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I. Mitch Albom
II. Capitalism and gender in spectator sports
III. Paris Hilton as the flipside of spectator sports
IV. The shrinking reality-based concerns of Amerika
and MIM strategy
V. Changing entertainment tastes and getting
over persynal attacks on defectors
from the bourgeoisie
It was the leading story on the CNN web page in the U.$. subsection on April 8th and the lead story below the graphic simulating a fold on the USA Today web page April 9th: famous sports writer Mitch Albom misreported a college basketball game.
Two players told him they were going to attend a basketball game as spectators. He reported it. They did not show up.
This has become a lead story for two reasons. The most important reason is that this is the sort of story that will sell, because it's about a topic the public is willing to pay for. Mitch Albom is a proven best-selling author. We need to dig further into why the public is willing to pay for this story and what it means.
The second reason that the Mitch Albom story is ahead of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in the news is that news editors dimly realize that the sports section of any newspaper casts doubt on the credibility of all the others, because across the country city newspapers report on the action of a local business enterprise known as a basketball, football or baseball sports team--with an obsession that might be considered lacking objectivity.
II. Capitalism and gender in sports
The news media attention brings billions into the coffers of the sports league owners. In turn, the sports teams reward sufficiently pliant newspapers and TV shows with interviews of players those newspapers made famous. Leagues make money and newspapers sell newspapers. If readers came to think that professional sports teams were an incredible distraction leading both to obesity and death by the spectating-prone and unethical lack of political effort in serious news, leagues and newspapers would be out of a lot of money.
To make up for the fact that the sports pages are really an advertising insertion similar to the grocery coupons, news editors occasionally report some dirt, the bigger the better to assuage guilty feelings. Low grades in college, drugs or the Kobe rape case are prime material. Days before the Kobe rape case started he signed a $40 million Nike contract, but business analysts reported that Kobe's image was too cheerful and squeaky clean for maximum sales to street youth who buy the basketball sneakers. When the Colorado rape case started, one sports team owner Mark Cuban reported it was all good for the NBA:(1) he ought to know as a Colorado sports team owner.
As all Hollywood celebrities ranging from Kobe to Paris Hilton know, publicity does not have to be favorable to make one rich: "it's when they stop talking about you that you are in trouble" is the rule known to every star and promoter. So somehow, this machine we call pornography has found a way to make money on the dirt of beloved heroes too, another reason the O.J. Simpson trial was "the trial of the century."
Yet, the effort to provide this sort of "balance" creates yet another dynamic. Some call it racism because sports celebrities are disproportionately people of color. This twist is what makes the most famous Black persyn in the world Michael Jordan, so we do not find this approach to be real anti-racism. We do not serve the oppressed nations by backing off criticism of spectator sports. There is a whole way of life of the people at stake, not just the acclaim of some multi-millionaires.
Ultimately, it's not that we want even-handed, non-racist neo-colonialism where lackeys everywhere are treated equally and oppressed nations people can only be entertainers treated equally among themselves--so Beyonce can get equal time with Britney Spears. Overall, what we need to see in this dynamic is that in order to perfume a money-making operation, "news" that should not be any priority ends up displacing serious subjects.
In Amerika, the celebrity and persynal life angle has its own dynamic. Dirt just spices up the whole sports story which otherwise would always be about the home team and its strengths and weaknesses.
III. Paris Hilton as the flipside of spectator sports
Sports celebrities and fans are disproportionately men, and that itself is proof that there is a gender dynamic surrounding the sports pages and TV sports shows, but the same fundamental dynamic explains why an alleged hack of pornography star Paris Hilton's cell phone exceeded even the Mitch Albom story in media play. For all the difference it would make, Paris Hilton could pay someone to hack her cellphone, so she could get some more media attention. It's all about how media compete for money and the trends in what the public buys.
To take just a tiny fraction of the Paris Hilton phenomenon, we can do a Google search for only documents including her full name, the phrase "cell phone" and the word "hack." (Hack is informal and not the only word that could be used just to get an idea how narrowly we can frame this.) The search turns up 15,500 entries in the non-news section of Google alone. In contrast, there are only 2,650 entries for "Maoist Internationalist Movement." There are also only 3,770 entries for the "Communist Party of Peru." So it means that a day in the life of Paris Hilton is more significant to people bothering to put up web pages than MIM and the Communist Party of Peru combined.
The above facts about people's efforts with web pages will cause the larger portion of the deluded Amerikan so-called Left to say something paraphrased as follows: "That's what I hate about MIM. It's always reminding me just how dismal the situation is." We cannot make progress if we do not know where we are starting from and we are apt to make all sorts of wrong comparisons if not firmly grounded in reality. We have to see if we can figure out the underlying trends and utilize our knowledge for proletarian goals.
IV. The shrinking reality-based concerns of Amerika and MIM strategy
"Reality TV" is another example of how entertainment displaces everything else. We want to exclude that kind of "reality" from discussion. Instead we should talk about how the Bush administration is now deriding progressive intellectuals as "reality-based" people who do not realize that the united $tates is an empire that creates reality by sheer force.(2) (The grain of truth in the criticism is that the Amerikan so-called Left is so effete as not to realize the relationship between violence and truth.) In this article, we are showing that the reality-based community in Amerika as defined by that Bu$h administration official has been shrinking, if the purchases and trends of the entertainment media are any guide--the kind of thing that allowed "Naked News" and path-breaker "Hard Copy" to surpass so many mainstream news outlets so quickly.
What we are leading to is why our central task "to create public opinion and the independent institutions of the oppressed" nicely combats a major trend. In contrast are those who deride MIM for not selling MIM Notes. A criticism by a student journalist at Harvard compared MIM and the New Right publications jointly for being free. Yet at the same time, the critics take ads from corrupting sources themselves. That is one of the reasons Ross Perot was such a phenomenon: people want to fantasize about a politically objective billionaire who owes no political favors to any donors, because he's got his own money some other way unlike a Clinton or Dole who has to serve the corporate gluttons or get out of the game.
There is a progressive underlying thrust with that early 1990s fantasy about Perot. Some would say we should promote our own celebrities to join in the dynamic overtaking Amerika. We would agree that some organizations should take that approach, including anti-fascist and anti-war organizations, but we do not do it with our own party, because we seek to shut out the entertainment dynamic from the party itself and emphasize the party's scientific tasks. We call it a struggle against the gender aristocracy and bureaucracy in theoretical terms, and we include the Mitch Albom issue in that category.
Some sneer at MIM for putting our own money into MIM Notes and they sneer at Ross Perot for being rich enough to do what he did. At bottom in the majority-exploiter countries it's about leisure-time choices, what to do with one's own share of the surplus-value.
The MIM tactic seen since MIM's beginnings and its predecessors and seen best on Internet evades all persynality questions and gets right into serious substance questions. We believe that the trends in news are showing that MIM was always correct in combating something it did not name as a gender dynamic until after encountering Catharine MacKinnon's work in 1986 and 1987 and considering other feminist theory in the late 1980s.
An article in the student daily newspaper the Harvard Crimson on March 31 titled "Harvard Students Less Satisfied Than Peers With Undergraduate Experience, Survey Finds" is another example of what we are concerned about and how organizations can find themselves affected by the larger world's gender dynamics. Long ago college campuses started building shopping malls out of fear of losing competition for the best and highest paying students. Now it seems that Harvard is fifth from the bottom in a list of 31 colleges when it comes to student happiness as of a 2002 survey, and so the inevitable focus becomes why Harvard parties more poorly than the other colleges.
MIM can also report from its own activism that a major university recently advertised on a medium sized billboard on campus a sex party (orgy) in an official university building. Many other universities are trying to do something similar and ever-so slightly less obvious. A play sweeping even the most staid campuses at the moment, with large grant money behind it, is "Vagina Monologues." Slogans put up on posters and chalked on the ground on campuses everywhere are about the empowerment of sex. If that helps people get past the sex issue and on to other things, all fine and good. Yet that's not what we see happening.
The sex party competition on campus is an example why the "ivory tower" is better than competing with the "real world." As it stands now, the colleges that compete against that particular dynamic do so by offering theocratic instruction which is lower quality than that found at the regular secular sex-party institutions.
What is true of colleges is partly true of political parties also. If MIM decided to compete head-on with "Hard Copy," it would be a big mistake. We have to write off some demands while starting from the bottom in changing subjective preferences.
What MIM calls a gender or leisure-time dynamic is another reason that important news has to be free. The competition against serious news is already overwhelming. One important organization to recognize what MIM is saying is indymedia.org. It's another case where people realized that they have to pay for their own media and be serious about it instead of expecting the infotainment industry to do a better job.
There are many, many reactionaries who think MIM is the worst thing in the world, but there is another segment of conservatives that thinks the public's priorities are even more troubling than MIM. The same people are aghast at the direction the New York Times and other increasingly less serious papers are taking to compete with the entertainment industry. We consider that a correct attitude; even though, in a majority-exploiter country, the people who pay serious attention to politics will still end up mostly reactionary.
A Fox News watcher described by a friend of his as someone not to "get started" on political topics, stopped by a MIM Ward Churchill table. Yet he asked why the media has to be all infotainment and derided people "too busy having ice cream" to pay attention to Iraq and international news generally. This is an illustration of the existence of a sector of the status-quo oriented petty-bourgeoisie which wonders which is worse--political apathy or the most radical activism. As the political climate cools in a country, we can expect to see such a sector emerge.
True, as exploiters can never unite, the imperialists use these leisure-time dynamics against each other, but the international proletariat has the most to lose from such a focus and style of entertainment. The Monica Lewinsky scandal hurt the international proletariat more than it hurt Bill Clinton. No reform or revolution arose from the Monica Lewinsky scandal--just a lot of media absorption and individualism. The scandal was pornography guised as serious news.
Overall, the imperialists correctly believe that certain leisure-time dynamics disproportionately benefit them. If imperialists can wage as many wars as they like without disruption from a public paying attention, and if the economic situation allows that, there is much to be said for the success of that imperialist strategy. It is a conscious strategy to cool out student movements globally to focus them on sex and travel--entertainment. The remainder can play militarist video games or join the army to shoot people for fun at Iraqi checkpoints. The entertainment dynamic allows the imperialists to avoid a direct political assault that can often backfire while providing the same desired stability for imperialism.
At the same time, MIM has already reported that reliance on the gender aristocracy building strategy by the imperialists has some down sides for the imperialists too. The imperialists are seeing a dislocation in the social security system thanks to a shortage of children. Perhaps more importantly, the imperialists themselves cannot do a good job in struggle as their own culture rots their thinking abilities and the abilities of their henchmen. Right now the imperialists can afford the rot because the proletariat has not elevated its struggle ability sufficiently. As time goes on, imperialist decadence may make it too easy for the proletariat to come to power and we may run the risk of low quality political struggle succeeding when we cannot actually afford such a turn of the dialectic given the history of wars and militarism, where we need to end them decisively soon.
V. Changing entertainment tastes and getting over persynal attacks on defectors from the bourgeoisie
MIM intervenes in the struggles over what is considered entertainment. There are often intrinsic reasons that the public likes a game or abandons it, something appealing about its rules or objectives for instance. MIM seeks to get on top of that and steer it.
We are here to say that what people find entertaining can and does change. Whether we call it "morality" or "entertainment" hardly matters, since both moral activism and entertainment occur after one's economic needs for food, shelter and clothing have been addressed in the majority- exploiter countries. (The situation is opposite in the exploited countries, because there the communist movement is the way to obtain even short-term survival.) In this sense it is wrong to consider MIM particularly "moral," just because we put so much time and money into politics. It could just as easily be said that MIM does not find imperialist death and destruction entertaining and does find the communist movement entertaining.
People who laugh at the easy life of communist activists in the majority-exploiter countries or impugn the motivations of trust fund anarchists have not really dealt with the overall economic change in most of the imperialist countries that made most people exploiters. If there is to be any movement or politics it has to be of the nature where there are trust-fund anarchists. That's just how the economy is. People making fun of trust fund anarchists are just spending their money on NFL tickets anyway, so the frame of reference should be to compare what people do with their leisure-time and money, not to allow the labor aristocracy to pose as if it is so exploited and supposedly works so hard while the trust-fund anarchists run about blowing up Seattle. No, the trust-fund anarchists made Seattle a big deal, and the reactionaries attacking them were at NASCAR races, paying for overpriced baseball tickets and lying back in front of a boob tube displaying Monica Lewinsky's stained dress. When the reactionaries attack people spending time on politics, we need to attack them back for their labor aristocracy version of political correctness and identity politics. There are more than a few alleged reds substituting labor aristocracy identity politics for a liberating culture.
Even if a majority-exploiter comrade endangers health and other forms of well-being while concentrating on the movement, we can say the same of people in other forms of entertainment, such as bourgeois race car drivers or bourgeois professional hockey players. So a so-called poor comrade without health insurance, working all hours of the week for the revolution, giving up drugs because they cost too much--such comrades in the majority-exploiter countries made choices about their entertainment. This is true and especially important even to the lumpen in the majority-exploiter countries. In the exploited countries such choices do not exist, but we have no choice but to abandon that frame of reference in the majority-exploiter countries, to recruit the minority that will defect to the international proletariat's side. The enemy's psychological warfare questioning the motivations of petty-bourgeois and outright bourgeois people defecting to the international proletariat's side has to be countered. Countering the propaganda means trashing labor aristocracy lifestyle politics and bullshit stories told by people who "made it on their own," as if the united $tates were not a stolen land with an economy built by stolen people sustained by stolen resources and super-repressed labor in the Third World.
It's also about the nature of the humyn condition and whether we accept that real entertainment is only sex and booze and that that is permanent to alleged "human nature"--as "human nature" exists before we Marxists manage to bio-engineer our species. We can learn not to enjoy shooting and bombing in Iraq while we do enjoy mundane aspects of political struggle in a country where we are vastly outnumbered.
MIM, indymedia.org and even Ross Perot types demonstrate that majority-exploiter country people can see politics as a substitute for the NFL, shopping, drugs and orgies. No one is 100% absorbed in one form of entertainment, but the proportions involved in each persyn's leisure-time fascinations can change.
Notes:
1. http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90431&page=1
2. This famous quote deriding reality-based thinkers
can be found in many places, but an anti-war
Republican website is one place to discuss it.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3822