Bill Hicks and the Place of Corporate Comedy
By CHARLES M. YOUNG
I have three comedians on my iPod: Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Bill Hicks. All of them evolved as much into prophets as comedians, and all of them died younger than they should have from maladies that probably had something to do with the stress of being a live performer on the road in corporate America.
Hicks died the youngest, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32 in 1994. Perhaps his pancreas had had enough of his drinking, which started later than usual at the age of 21 but got excessive quickly. Or maybe it was road food from all that driving to comedy clubs around the country. He looked puffy by his mid-20s. If Hicks came back from the dead, he could do a good routine about government agents slipping some carcinogen (white sugar?) into his food because his routines had come too close to the truth.
That was one of his best joke constructions, taking some dark conspiracy theory lurking in the collective unconscious and validating not so much the theory as the paranoia that got the imagination fired up in the first place. In a routine called "The Elite" on his album Rant in E-Minor, Hicks speculates on what happens to a new president.
Hicks did believe the Warren Commission was a lie, but you can have any theory you want about the Kennedy assassination and get the joke there. He's describing a fictional situation, and in literal reality, it doesn't happen like that. Long before anyone is elected president, they are vetted for obedience. Nobody has to tell politicians to obey, or what the consequences of disobeying would be. New presidents want to obey, and that's why they got the nomination. What Hicks is getting at is not so much conspiracy but the deeper truth that inspires so many grassroots conspiracy theories. It really is a tiny number of industrialist/capitalist scumfucks who control everything. They will tell any lie and commit any crime to keep their power. Hicks not only understood that, he could make phenomenal jokes about it.
I saw the recent documentary about Hicks, American: The Bill Hicks Story. As a coming of age story about a teenager who figures out that he's funny, becomes fascinated by the mechanics of humor, and is performing in nightclubs before he can drive, it's compelling and even triumphant. Growing up talented in the Deep South always has its element of heroism. The story is not so much about finding himself, which he did by his late teens, but finding a place to display what he found of himself. That was a struggle until the end.
The documentary half-clarifies the infamous incident where David Letterman censored Hicks' routine in a 1993 appearance, just removed the whole bit from his show, which demoralized Hicks toward the end of his life. In 2009, Letterman decided to clean up his karma, inviting Hicks' mother on the show and apologizing for his poor judgment as an editor. The documentary shows the apology, which was gracious, but leaves out the actual routine, which Letterman did run in its entirety for the first time on the show.
Thanks to the wonders of Youtube, it is possible to see the segment (Hicks' mom and the routine), which is revelatory. I have four albums and two documentaries on Hicks, and the censored Letterman bit is one of his least funny. The guy is flailing, trying to maintain his shock value while staying inside the line of corporate television, which means he goes after lame targets like Billy Ray Cyrus. The joke that purportedly got him censored was a suggestion that the right-to-life movement blockade cemeteries instead of abortion clinics. Hicks picked a worthy target but missed it with a weak joke. Letterman was apparently afraid of offending a large group that gets offended easily, but the real problem with the routine was that Hicks' heart wasn't in it. His humor depended on crossing the line—not the line of good taste, which is easy, but the line of taboo truths—while Letterman has always stayed safely and lucratively within the line.
It has been said that Hicks' influence lives on in the comedy of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. Not really. Stewart and Maher are both, at heart, GWOT Democrats. They have grown steadily more unfunny as Obama has steadily revealed himself as a tool of the usual industrialist/capitalist scumfucks. Even during the Bush administration, both Maher and Stewart were careful not to insult the military, which is way past the taboo line anywhere on corporate television.
On Rant in E-Minor, Hicks had this to say in a routine about integrating gays in the military: "Anyone DUMB ENOUGH to want to be in the military should be allowed in. End of story. That should be the only requirement. I don't care how many pushups you can do. Put on a helmet. Go wait in that foxhole and we'll tell you when we want you to go kill somebody. You know what I mean? I get so sick. I've watched these fuckin' Congressional hearings, and all these military guys, and all these pundits saying, 'Ohhhh, the espirit de corps will be affected and we are so moral...' Excuse me! Aren't you all fuckin' hired killers? Shut up! You are thugs! When we need you to blow the fuck out of a a nation of little brown people, we'll let you know. Until then...'We are the military. Is that a village of children and kids? Where's the napalm? Boooooom! I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids.'"
Compare that with Maher's orgasmic cheerleading for assassination on the most recent Real Time with Bill Maher:
Here's what Hicks had to say about the new Democrat who took office a year before Hicks died:
Hicks had no mercy on his fellow comedians, especially a simpering demagogue like Jay Leno:
Why the NFL Would Do Us a Favor by Canceling the Upcoming Season
By ROBERT LIPSYTE
There's nothing like a little dust-up between millionaires and billionaires to start us thousandaires yawning. And when the upcoming pro football season is in danger of being cancelled because of it, we're likely to say: a plague on both your mansions.
Too bad, because the current struggle between labor and management in the National Football League not only reflects the current attacks on unions across the country but conjures up, even if in cartoon fashion, some crucial American issues: racism, classism, sexism, recreational violence, and the health-care gap. No wonder football seems to have replaced baseball as the national pastime.
While the legalities of, and mathematics behind, the issues at the heart of the NFL dispute may be complex, the basic issues are not. The league's owners cry economic woe, while refusing to open their books. They insist on adding two games to the present regular season of 16 games and at the same time are trying to reduce the players' share of revenues. Moreover, they have been remarkably unwilling to guarantee long-term health benefits to the players, even as evidence mounts that dementia and early death are linked to the sort of brain trauma commonly suffered in football collisions.
It's not exactly a fair fight, which of course is why unions were invented. It's estimated that half of the NFL owners are worth at least a billion dollars each, while slightly less than half of NFL players make more than a million dollars annually. The average player's career lasts fewer than four years.
Most traditional sports media -- while claiming to represent those thousandaires, the fans -- have framed the battle as one between rich, greedy young men versus very rich, very greedy older men. The young men, so goes the present media line, were overpaid in the good times, and now, like everyone else, must give back in the economic bad times for the sake of the game. Not surprisingly, this greedy v. greedy take on a football dispute, which threatens the upcoming season, is hardly likely to engage the empathy of TV viewers who just want to watch the game as a respite from joblessness, foreclosure, or the problems that come from inadequate health insurance.
In case you haven't noticed, this isn't all that different from the way the larger labor struggles of American society have been framed recently. Greedy, overpaid municipal employees, for example, watching the clock until their bloated pensions and benefits kick in, are bleeding beleaguered governments supported by the rest of us. Okay, your basic offensive lineman isn't exactly like a beleaguered teacher or nurse, but the key element of the plot to destroy his ability to bargain collectively against more powerful forces is the same: make him the alien other, make him different from us.
Losin' That Lovin' Feeling
Back when we thought professional athletes were merely bigger and stronger versions of ourselves and the teams they played for were extensions of our pride of place, labor unrest in sports was personal and painful. Fans wondered how a player could hold out for more money when they would have played the game for free. How could a league threaten to cancel a season? Didn't it know the games gave rhythm to their lives?
In more than 50 years covering sports, I find the most striking change is in the attitude of fans toward the athletes. Fans have, I suspect, lost most of the emotional attachment they once had for "their" players and much of the old extended-family feeling toward their teams as well. And there's some justification for that: they've been hurt too many times by callous trades, players selling themselves to the highest bidder, bad behavior of every sort, and franchises simply picking up and moving elsewhere.
But there's something larger going on as well, echoed by the seemingly successful latest attacks on organized labor highlighted by the recent demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, and in the creation of the Tea Party League by those seemingly everyday folk who just happen to be funded by the same kind of robber barons who blackmail cities and states into paying for their ballparks.
Whether you're a TPL or an NFL fan (or both), the odds are increasing that you've lost connection to the players and instead begun to identify with the powerboys, the owners, whether of the corporate nation or the National Football League. This is hardly a phenomenon that began with sports, but it's vividly accessible in the simpler, more clear-cut world shaped around the player-owner-fan dynamic.
I first saw it revving up while covering our previous national pastime, baseball. In 1957, the year I joined the New York Times' sports department, two of the city's three baseball teams, the Dodgers and the Giants, decamped to California for better stadium deals. Brooklyn Dodgers fans seemed most bereaved and outraged. The team's players had often lived in their neighborhoods. Their vicissitudes had made possible conversations that crossed the usual class and racial divides. In churches and temples, clergymen led prayers to end losing streaks. Brooklyn was proud of its progressive history -- only 10 years earlier, Jackie Robinson had broken the major league color barrier at Ebbets Field. More African-American players soon joined him.
This was not the first franchise shift (Boston, St. Louis, and Philadelphia had all moved earlier in the 1950s) but this one got the most attention, perhaps because even then there were so many fine writers and academics in Brooklyn. The discussion has never abated.
The flight from Brooklyn to Los Angeles became a symbol of fan betrayal.
It was in those last months before the move, when the heckling from the stands grew vicious, that I first sensed the old order beginning to fracture. Those were, of course, just the initial fissures. Since then, the economic and social gap between fan and jock has widened to a yawning abyss as the millionaires and billionaires appeared and sports stadiums increasingly became the preserves of those wealthy enough to fork over staggering sums for seats.
Meanwhile, the financial value of sport teams escalated and the role of sportswriters as information couriers between players and fans became increasingly obsolete. TV freed athletes from needing print journalists to present them to the public, and most TV sports journalists -- the Daily Beast writer and editor Bryan Curtis has called sportscasting "a halfway house for half-wits" -- were thrilled to remain part of the show on the industry's terms.
Celebrity Sports Writing
From the athlete to the owner, sports increasingly became a matter of branding. Athletes could work to control their images through ads and paid appearances. Nowadays, blogs, tweets, and Facebook pages give teams and athletes direct access to fans. They can announce (and spin) their own news. There are tightly-controlled and infrequent mass media conferences. One-on-one interviews are negotiated with agents and public relations advisors. Sports writing has become another department of celebrity journalism.
Attempts at progressive activism within sports tended to be co-opted by cash; product endorsement money (think of those Nike ads) has usually kept even socially conscious athletes quiet. Few successful watchdog organizations were ever formed, though Ralph Nader's revived League of Fans may be something to keep an eye on. Its first public statement was a call for the end of college athletic scholarships, a fundamental building block of the pro game.
The violent excitement of football, its aggressive marketing, and the solidarity of the owners -- many of the more recent ones new-money entrepreneurs -- were all factors that helped push the game past baseball in audience and revenue. It captured the techno-smashmouth-imperialism of an empire that didn't quite know it was fading. Every mad-dog linebacker was an avatar for hedge-fund managers.
Some days I think that the worst-case scenario -- no National Football League games this year -- might be a blessing, especially if it were extended down through college and high school into the peewee leagues. It would be a year in which we could study those leading American issues that football vivifies so well.
Take lack of proper healthcare. No one is discussing steroids at the moment, although the freakish size and musculature of so many players would seem to indicate either the arrival of ever more sophisticated performance-enhancing drugs that escape detection or testing that is less rigorous than we have been led to believe.
The most pressing immediate concern, however, is head trauma. It usually becomes apparent years after retirement, but it begins in childhood when pounding on more vulnerable brains leads to lasting damage. A year off would give everyone a chance to let the steroids drain out and the testing for head injuries (even among youngsters) begin.
The classism and racism in pro football is almost too obvious to be worth mentioning. That the players are now predominately African-American, many of them sons of the underclass, may make this revolt of the gladiators even harder for the entitled white, ego-driven plutocrats -- not to mention the fans, predominately white and ever more likely to identify with the positions of the owners in this dispute. Otherwise, how do you explain the phenomenal expansion of the fantasy leagues in which every fan gets to be both owner and general manager of his or her own team?
And of course, it hardly needs be said that sexism remains pernicious, ranging as it does from those endless filler shots of hottie cheerleaders to a continuing pervasive discrimination against female college athletes which is frequently an attempt to protect the existence of large college football teams. Title IX, the federal law mandating fair play for women, requires an equity between male and female athletes. To balance their 100-plus squads of football players, college athletic departments routinely lie about the number of varsity female athletes they support.
And then there's the violence, on field as well as off (about 20% of NFL players have arrest records, according to articles and a book by investigative reporters Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger); and don't forget in the living room -- domestic abuse hotlines light up after big games. Is it the gambling, the liquor, the testosterone?
Maybe we should be rooting for the labor impasse after all, at least through the coming season, during which we could learn some new football cheers:
By CHARLES M. YOUNG
I have three comedians on my iPod: Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Bill Hicks. All of them evolved as much into prophets as comedians, and all of them died younger than they should have from maladies that probably had something to do with the stress of being a live performer on the road in corporate America.
Hicks died the youngest, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32 in 1994. Perhaps his pancreas had had enough of his drinking, which started later than usual at the age of 21 but got excessive quickly. Or maybe it was road food from all that driving to comedy clubs around the country. He looked puffy by his mid-20s. If Hicks came back from the dead, he could do a good routine about government agents slipping some carcinogen (white sugar?) into his food because his routines had come too close to the truth.
That was one of his best joke constructions, taking some dark conspiracy theory lurking in the collective unconscious and validating not so much the theory as the paranoia that got the imagination fired up in the first place. In a routine called "The Elite" on his album Rant in E-Minor, Hicks speculates on what happens to a new president.
"When you win, you go in this smokey room with the 12 industrialist/capitalist scumfucks who got you [elected]...And this screen comes down—whrrrrrrr—and this big guy says, 'Roll the film.' It's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before. [Big laugh.] And it looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll. And the screen comes up and they go to the new president and say, 'Any questions?'"
Hicks did believe the Warren Commission was a lie, but you can have any theory you want about the Kennedy assassination and get the joke there. He's describing a fictional situation, and in literal reality, it doesn't happen like that. Long before anyone is elected president, they are vetted for obedience. Nobody has to tell politicians to obey, or what the consequences of disobeying would be. New presidents want to obey, and that's why they got the nomination. What Hicks is getting at is not so much conspiracy but the deeper truth that inspires so many grassroots conspiracy theories. It really is a tiny number of industrialist/capitalist scumfucks who control everything. They will tell any lie and commit any crime to keep their power. Hicks not only understood that, he could make phenomenal jokes about it.
I saw the recent documentary about Hicks, American: The Bill Hicks Story. As a coming of age story about a teenager who figures out that he's funny, becomes fascinated by the mechanics of humor, and is performing in nightclubs before he can drive, it's compelling and even triumphant. Growing up talented in the Deep South always has its element of heroism. The story is not so much about finding himself, which he did by his late teens, but finding a place to display what he found of himself. That was a struggle until the end.
The documentary half-clarifies the infamous incident where David Letterman censored Hicks' routine in a 1993 appearance, just removed the whole bit from his show, which demoralized Hicks toward the end of his life. In 2009, Letterman decided to clean up his karma, inviting Hicks' mother on the show and apologizing for his poor judgment as an editor. The documentary shows the apology, which was gracious, but leaves out the actual routine, which Letterman did run in its entirety for the first time on the show.
Thanks to the wonders of Youtube, it is possible to see the segment (Hicks' mom and the routine), which is revelatory. I have four albums and two documentaries on Hicks, and the censored Letterman bit is one of his least funny. The guy is flailing, trying to maintain his shock value while staying inside the line of corporate television, which means he goes after lame targets like Billy Ray Cyrus. The joke that purportedly got him censored was a suggestion that the right-to-life movement blockade cemeteries instead of abortion clinics. Hicks picked a worthy target but missed it with a weak joke. Letterman was apparently afraid of offending a large group that gets offended easily, but the real problem with the routine was that Hicks' heart wasn't in it. His humor depended on crossing the line—not the line of good taste, which is easy, but the line of taboo truths—while Letterman has always stayed safely and lucratively within the line.
It has been said that Hicks' influence lives on in the comedy of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. Not really. Stewart and Maher are both, at heart, GWOT Democrats. They have grown steadily more unfunny as Obama has steadily revealed himself as a tool of the usual industrialist/capitalist scumfucks. Even during the Bush administration, both Maher and Stewart were careful not to insult the military, which is way past the taboo line anywhere on corporate television.
On Rant in E-Minor, Hicks had this to say in a routine about integrating gays in the military: "Anyone DUMB ENOUGH to want to be in the military should be allowed in. End of story. That should be the only requirement. I don't care how many pushups you can do. Put on a helmet. Go wait in that foxhole and we'll tell you when we want you to go kill somebody. You know what I mean? I get so sick. I've watched these fuckin' Congressional hearings, and all these military guys, and all these pundits saying, 'Ohhhh, the espirit de corps will be affected and we are so moral...' Excuse me! Aren't you all fuckin' hired killers? Shut up! You are thugs! When we need you to blow the fuck out of a a nation of little brown people, we'll let you know. Until then...'We are the military. Is that a village of children and kids? Where's the napalm? Boooooom! I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids.'"
Compare that with Maher's orgasmic cheerleading for assassination on the most recent Real Time with Bill Maher:
"Barak Obama is one efficient, steely nerved, black Ninja, gangsta president." He went on to congratulate Obama for out-Republicaning the Republicans.There's a modern prophet for you, like it takes nerves of steel to have hired killers shoot an unarmed man in the face on the other side of the world. Somehow I think that if Bill Hicks were alive, he'd be pointing that out. And he'd be pointing it out in little nightclubs (or in the UK, where he had more freedom to talk about America), not on Real Time.
Here's what Hicks had to say about the new Democrat who took office a year before Hicks died:
"'Ohhhh, that Clinton. Don't you have hope for Bill Clinton?' There no fuckin' hope in that guy. They're all the same. I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here: 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.' 'Hey wait a minute, there's one guy holding up both puppets!' 'Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here's Love Connection, watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer, you fuckin' morons.'"
Hicks had no mercy on his fellow comedians, especially a simpering demagogue like Jay Leno:
"It all started when he did the Doritos commercial. Here's the deal, folks. You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call forever. End of story. Okay? You're another corporate fuckin' shill. You're another whore at the capitalist gangbang...If you do a commercial, there's a price on your head. Everything you say is suspect. Every word that comes out of your mouth is like a turd falling into my drink."Has that little piece of humorous commentary aged one minute since 1993? Everyone else is just following Leno to the bank. They don't even think about it anymore. I mean, who cares if Leno "betrayed" Conan O'Brien when Leno came back to the Tonight Show? They both betrayed themselves first. What O'Brien stands for is Bud Light, iPhone, American Express and whatever else he's endorsed. What's to betray? O'Brien even tried to make fun of himself for taking the money in his Bud commercial, as if Ivy League snark immunizes you from being thrown off the artistic roll call forever. Nope. It's just another turd in Bill Hicks' drink, and that's where the industrialist/capitalist scumfucks want their corporate comedy.
++++++++++++++++++++
Why the NFL Would Do Us a Favor by Canceling the Upcoming Season
By ROBERT LIPSYTE
There's nothing like a little dust-up between millionaires and billionaires to start us thousandaires yawning. And when the upcoming pro football season is in danger of being cancelled because of it, we're likely to say: a plague on both your mansions.
Too bad, because the current struggle between labor and management in the National Football League not only reflects the current attacks on unions across the country but conjures up, even if in cartoon fashion, some crucial American issues: racism, classism, sexism, recreational violence, and the health-care gap. No wonder football seems to have replaced baseball as the national pastime.
While the legalities of, and mathematics behind, the issues at the heart of the NFL dispute may be complex, the basic issues are not. The league's owners cry economic woe, while refusing to open their books. They insist on adding two games to the present regular season of 16 games and at the same time are trying to reduce the players' share of revenues. Moreover, they have been remarkably unwilling to guarantee long-term health benefits to the players, even as evidence mounts that dementia and early death are linked to the sort of brain trauma commonly suffered in football collisions.
It's not exactly a fair fight, which of course is why unions were invented. It's estimated that half of the NFL owners are worth at least a billion dollars each, while slightly less than half of NFL players make more than a million dollars annually. The average player's career lasts fewer than four years.
Most traditional sports media -- while claiming to represent those thousandaires, the fans -- have framed the battle as one between rich, greedy young men versus very rich, very greedy older men. The young men, so goes the present media line, were overpaid in the good times, and now, like everyone else, must give back in the economic bad times for the sake of the game. Not surprisingly, this greedy v. greedy take on a football dispute, which threatens the upcoming season, is hardly likely to engage the empathy of TV viewers who just want to watch the game as a respite from joblessness, foreclosure, or the problems that come from inadequate health insurance.
In case you haven't noticed, this isn't all that different from the way the larger labor struggles of American society have been framed recently. Greedy, overpaid municipal employees, for example, watching the clock until their bloated pensions and benefits kick in, are bleeding beleaguered governments supported by the rest of us. Okay, your basic offensive lineman isn't exactly like a beleaguered teacher or nurse, but the key element of the plot to destroy his ability to bargain collectively against more powerful forces is the same: make him the alien other, make him different from us.
Losin' That Lovin' Feeling
Back when we thought professional athletes were merely bigger and stronger versions of ourselves and the teams they played for were extensions of our pride of place, labor unrest in sports was personal and painful. Fans wondered how a player could hold out for more money when they would have played the game for free. How could a league threaten to cancel a season? Didn't it know the games gave rhythm to their lives?
In more than 50 years covering sports, I find the most striking change is in the attitude of fans toward the athletes. Fans have, I suspect, lost most of the emotional attachment they once had for "their" players and much of the old extended-family feeling toward their teams as well. And there's some justification for that: they've been hurt too many times by callous trades, players selling themselves to the highest bidder, bad behavior of every sort, and franchises simply picking up and moving elsewhere.
But there's something larger going on as well, echoed by the seemingly successful latest attacks on organized labor highlighted by the recent demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, and in the creation of the Tea Party League by those seemingly everyday folk who just happen to be funded by the same kind of robber barons who blackmail cities and states into paying for their ballparks.
Whether you're a TPL or an NFL fan (or both), the odds are increasing that you've lost connection to the players and instead begun to identify with the powerboys, the owners, whether of the corporate nation or the National Football League. This is hardly a phenomenon that began with sports, but it's vividly accessible in the simpler, more clear-cut world shaped around the player-owner-fan dynamic.
I first saw it revving up while covering our previous national pastime, baseball. In 1957, the year I joined the New York Times' sports department, two of the city's three baseball teams, the Dodgers and the Giants, decamped to California for better stadium deals. Brooklyn Dodgers fans seemed most bereaved and outraged. The team's players had often lived in their neighborhoods. Their vicissitudes had made possible conversations that crossed the usual class and racial divides. In churches and temples, clergymen led prayers to end losing streaks. Brooklyn was proud of its progressive history -- only 10 years earlier, Jackie Robinson had broken the major league color barrier at Ebbets Field. More African-American players soon joined him.
This was not the first franchise shift (Boston, St. Louis, and Philadelphia had all moved earlier in the 1950s) but this one got the most attention, perhaps because even then there were so many fine writers and academics in Brooklyn. The discussion has never abated.
The flight from Brooklyn to Los Angeles became a symbol of fan betrayal.
It was in those last months before the move, when the heckling from the stands grew vicious, that I first sensed the old order beginning to fracture. Those were, of course, just the initial fissures. Since then, the economic and social gap between fan and jock has widened to a yawning abyss as the millionaires and billionaires appeared and sports stadiums increasingly became the preserves of those wealthy enough to fork over staggering sums for seats.
Meanwhile, the financial value of sport teams escalated and the role of sportswriters as information couriers between players and fans became increasingly obsolete. TV freed athletes from needing print journalists to present them to the public, and most TV sports journalists -- the Daily Beast writer and editor Bryan Curtis has called sportscasting "a halfway house for half-wits" -- were thrilled to remain part of the show on the industry's terms.
Celebrity Sports Writing
From the athlete to the owner, sports increasingly became a matter of branding. Athletes could work to control their images through ads and paid appearances. Nowadays, blogs, tweets, and Facebook pages give teams and athletes direct access to fans. They can announce (and spin) their own news. There are tightly-controlled and infrequent mass media conferences. One-on-one interviews are negotiated with agents and public relations advisors. Sports writing has become another department of celebrity journalism.
Attempts at progressive activism within sports tended to be co-opted by cash; product endorsement money (think of those Nike ads) has usually kept even socially conscious athletes quiet. Few successful watchdog organizations were ever formed, though Ralph Nader's revived League of Fans may be something to keep an eye on. Its first public statement was a call for the end of college athletic scholarships, a fundamental building block of the pro game.
The violent excitement of football, its aggressive marketing, and the solidarity of the owners -- many of the more recent ones new-money entrepreneurs -- were all factors that helped push the game past baseball in audience and revenue. It captured the techno-smashmouth-imperialism of an empire that didn't quite know it was fading. Every mad-dog linebacker was an avatar for hedge-fund managers.
Some days I think that the worst-case scenario -- no National Football League games this year -- might be a blessing, especially if it were extended down through college and high school into the peewee leagues. It would be a year in which we could study those leading American issues that football vivifies so well.
Take lack of proper healthcare. No one is discussing steroids at the moment, although the freakish size and musculature of so many players would seem to indicate either the arrival of ever more sophisticated performance-enhancing drugs that escape detection or testing that is less rigorous than we have been led to believe.
The most pressing immediate concern, however, is head trauma. It usually becomes apparent years after retirement, but it begins in childhood when pounding on more vulnerable brains leads to lasting damage. A year off would give everyone a chance to let the steroids drain out and the testing for head injuries (even among youngsters) begin.
The classism and racism in pro football is almost too obvious to be worth mentioning. That the players are now predominately African-American, many of them sons of the underclass, may make this revolt of the gladiators even harder for the entitled white, ego-driven plutocrats -- not to mention the fans, predominately white and ever more likely to identify with the positions of the owners in this dispute. Otherwise, how do you explain the phenomenal expansion of the fantasy leagues in which every fan gets to be both owner and general manager of his or her own team?
And of course, it hardly needs be said that sexism remains pernicious, ranging as it does from those endless filler shots of hottie cheerleaders to a continuing pervasive discrimination against female college athletes which is frequently an attempt to protect the existence of large college football teams. Title IX, the federal law mandating fair play for women, requires an equity between male and female athletes. To balance their 100-plus squads of football players, college athletic departments routinely lie about the number of varsity female athletes they support.
And then there's the violence, on field as well as off (about 20% of NFL players have arrest records, according to articles and a book by investigative reporters Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger); and don't forget in the living room -- domestic abuse hotlines light up after big games. Is it the gambling, the liquor, the testosterone?
Maybe we should be rooting for the labor impasse after all, at least through the coming season, during which we could learn some new football cheers:
Drain those steroids! Scan those brains! Open those financial books! Hit... softer!
