Sportally Wounded

Madame Most M,

My usual windbaggery will return next week. I am addressing Madame’s points, and then am commenting on something.

Clarification on clarification: We are both correct. Some of the stats are cited by Hedges (p. 44).

You bring up so many good points. And you bring to mind how excessively obsessed we are, in the workplace especially but by no means just there, in quantifying everything, in “measuring” everything. Some things require judgment and intuition, but we don’t want to allow for much of that. Quantify, quantify! Use those stats (or twist them) to justify whatever action you want to take—or to misapply them because they weren’t appropriate to use in the first place.

The video you reference should win an award for best short! :) It has many good points we should heed. A small caution (and it is small) is that one of its points, collaborative learning—all the rage in words, if not actions—also has its limits and drawbacks. But it can be far superior to the past methods, especially if the free rider aspect can be overcome.

“Economic and academic child abuse.” Another platinum winner from Madame! How right you are about the process of “education,” and the costs of it! And “marked by the owner”? That’s most of our culture, including education!

A more ruthless form of corporate power may indeed be lurking. Inverted totalitarianism could exercise more directly brutal and directly oppressive measures. They already showed a bit of it during the previous administration, when corporate malfeasance was extremely high, and our government—our supposed protector and watchdog—was aiding and abetting in colossal fashion. And our governmental representatives then deemed themselves “not accountable,” and dismissed outright the people’s faint attempts to hold them accountable. Historians will look back on that as a little realized at the time turning point. And perhaps in the direction that you have listed for us that Hedges postulates.

I turn to the matter I mentioned at the beginning of this post, to something indirectly, and perhaps directly, related to all the above and more: The spectacle that sports have become (not an easy admission for this sports player and sports fan).

Collegiate, and sometimes even high school, sports are supposed to be PART of education. Instead, in far too many cases they entirely supplant education in importance. Why? Again, because reality keeps making Hedges’ points for him. This is a spectacle culture. We value sports to an extreme, and have become fanatical in our diversions. Not because we haven’t been sports-minded, and properly so, for quite some time. But because we have let it become nearly all consuming, diverting us from the problems consuming our society.

Case in point: Penn State. Only a culture that was so focused on ITS sports team’s winning (because that’s where the sponsorships come from, the boosters pour money into, the prestige increases, etc.etc.), would turn a blind eye—and in the process become complicit to monstrously sick crimes—to something so wrong. Souls are sold. All in the name of slavish devotion to sports, WINNING sports.

Kind of like Rome and ITS gladiators, ITS gladiator trainers and coaches, ITS gladiator owners, ITS boosters, ITS rabid fans, ITS stadiums. All while Rome decayed from within and searing problems pressed upon its heating frontiers, and yet the populace remained diverted. After all, the thinking went, Rome had for so long been impregnable, been so long THE superpower. Despite all the problems, they thought, how could that ever change? It will all work out SOMEHOW. On to the games!

Rome at least had the excuse of no ready historical example to see the same hard lessons of history demonstrated.

We have no such excuse.

It is readily there for us to see, IF we pay attention. So far not!