Though I'm about to sound like an anti-sports dweeb, the truth is that sports have played a larger role in my life for most of my life than academics. This includes high school, where I was a two-sport varsity athlete at a large public school, multiple-time district champion, and an All-State athlete in a large, competitive state. This also includes college, where I was an NCAA Division I runner, multiple time All-Conference, multiple time All-East in both Cross Country and Track and Field, and am still, about a decade after graduation, in the all-time record books for a couple events. This is to say nothing of the fact that the center of my childhood was soccer games and baseball games and pickup football and basketball; and when my parents could finally get me inside the house by dark after a long summer day, I would sit in the living room with a set of colored pencils and draw action portraits of Bo Jackson, Kenny Lofton, Barry Bonds, and the rest of my favorite sports stars.
What I mean by all this is threefold: 1) I love and have loved sports deeply for my entire life; 2) I believe wholeheartedly that sports have an invaluable role to play in the development of young people and in a rich and fulfilling life; but 3) if you're a die-hard fan of Such-and-Such State who's about to be offended by what I have to say below about the NCAA and college basketball, and you're about to call me a poncy egghead dweeb, put up your athletic credentials first, cowboy, and let's get out the measuring stick.
The unavoidable truth is that the NCAA is among the most destructive forces in higher education--destructive not just for colleges and universities, but for 'student-athletes' in particular--and the NCAA basketball tournament (a.k.a. 'March Madness') is the epitome of that destructiveness.
Those who have watched the Tournament year after year will have picked up on three central elements of it that give away where the NCAA stands:
1) Insane commercialization, advertising time-outs, endless sponsorships, high-priced corporate boxes, all of which make March Madness the NCAA's most lucrative event (the NCAA files taxes as a 'nonprofit' entity).
2) Those nauseating NCAA 'student-athlete' propaganda ads featuring 'student-athletes' looking through a microscope or hunched over a book in the library, designed to make it look like the NCAA supports students qua students.
3) The abundance of forced profiles the media do each year on the handful of teams in the tournament that represent elite liberal arts colleges, the Ivy League, or other academically strong institutions where the athletes still aren't given a total pass (I find myself wondering to this day how many classes per Spring semester Allen Iverson went to at Georgetown back in the day). It's as if the world is acknowledging that there's something special about institutions whose primary commitment for ALL students is academics having success in a field of institutions whose 'student-athletes' are more like 'athlete-students' (the exception proves the rule).
As evidence of how completely tone-deaf the NCAA is to the fact that the world is increasingly aware of its various exploits in restricting the earning and working freedoms of 'student-athletes,' designing massive tournaments and events during the academic school year that require 'student-athletes' to miss weeks of class at a time, exploiting unpaid student labor to make billions of dollars, and generally being a stain on US higher education for so many more reasons I don't currently have time and space to enumerate, there's this:
This year's NCAA 'student-athlete' ads feature college students in labs and libraries doing academic work when a mascot and cheerleaders and student band rush in and start disrupting the student in his or her working environment. HA HA think the NCAA, that fight song is so loud that she can't get her reading done; and look! That trombone just knocked over her petri dish, ruining her experiment. Hilarious! At the end of these ads, the spokesman says something to the effect of 'OK, maybe you don't need us to be your cheerleaders in the classroom, but think of us as your mascot.' In other words, the NCAA wants you to think of it as an iconic representative of academic striving and classroom work: a mascot for the student.
If you think about this for two seconds it becomes clear how totally ridiculous this is. The NCAA ads make a joke out of the reality: that the NCAA doesn't support, but directly and powerfully disrupts the academic potential of 'student-athletes.' This was made even more lucid by a short spot that aired recently during the halftime segment of the Bucknell-Butler game: the producers put up a HA HA tweet from a student: 'watching Bucknell-Butler in psych class #productivity.' In other words, the NCAA and the thoughtless and shameful television networks complicit in (and contracted to) make a grand, moneygrabbing spectacle of March Madness are so boldly indifferent to the central (academic) mission of all the universities on whose backs the NCAA and the networks make their money that they make jokes about students' desire to watch the games directly disrupting a college class. For those of us who teach college classes at this time of year, it's clear that the students playing in the games aren't the only ones who are taken away from coursework for a couple weeks in the middle of the semester.
While myself and others have taken the NCAA to task more thoroughly, what I want to get across in this post is how complicit we all are who indulge in March Madness as thoughtlessly and with as cavalier an attitude about it as the producers who bring us the NCAA ads and the 'LOL skippig class' tweets. College sports should be for and about the students foremost; not about the NCAA's profiteering, the TV networks' collusion in this, the boosters and donors, etc. But most of all, it should be about the students ABOVE THE FANS. These students and their sports activities shouldn't be, as they currently are, primarily a product for you to enjoy come March. Especially since they get nothing of the profits made off of them as a product.
In short, if you're consuming March Madness without at least giving a little thought to how fucked up this situation is, you're either clueless, or engaged in a form moral cowardice that you're too weak to face.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
To Whom Does Your Lost Freedom Go?
Imagine you were born into a society in which the majority of people lived under the following conditions:
1) They wake up early to report for labor; failure to report on time results in censure.
2) They cannot leave the Labor Compound until a supervisor or a judgmental cadre of fellow laborers says so, usually after having labored at Labor Compound for the duration of the day and part of the night.
3) They sleep 8 hours of a 24-hour day, work for Labor Compound 8 hours/day, and dedicate 2-3 hours/day to exercising limited freedom to do what they choose.
4) They are tagged with tracking censors which collect data on where they go, whom they interact with, and what they do during all hours at the Labor Compound. This data is reported to supervisors who use it to further manipulate the conditions of labor in the Compound.
5) Their Labor Compound supervisors enforce strict policies dictating the emotional state of their laborers. Laborers who fail to demonstrate happiness with their labor on the Compound are censured.
6) Their Labor Compound supervisors rig computers in the Labor Compound to censor content on the Internet to limit access for laborers.
7) They are subject to drug testing by their Labor Compound supervisors, even if they've never been suspected of, accused of, or prosecuted for illegal drug use.
8) Their access to healthcare is determined by their Labor Compound.
9) Their obligations to the Labor Compounds determine whether and under what conditions they can have children.
10) They can be dismissed from the Labor Compound for any reason, at the will of Compound supervisors.
These being the case, we haven't even gotten to the sad part. The sad part is that if I asked you whether these policies were more prevalent in China or North Korea, you'd think seriously about the question. The sad part is that if I asked you if these were appropriate living conditions for someone who values individual freedom and democracy, you'd say absolutely not.
What's even sadder is that if I told you these conditions were imposed and enforced by a government, you'd be outraged; but if I told you these conditions were imposed and enforced by an employer, you'd shrug your shoulders.
You might pause and consider the fact that, regardless of who's imposing these conditions, these conditions are the reality for a vast majority of Americans. Land of the free, home of the brave, is it?
You're probably thinking: wait a minute, I'm an employee 'at will' (if you're thinking like an attorney); I have the choice to work or not to work under such conditions. This is different from a scenario in which the government mandates that I do these things, against my will, and by the force of law, and of sovereign power.
You're right in this respect. These are indeed two very different scenarios (even though, in practice, they produce very comparable realities). The thing about choice, however, is it's not (ironically) a yes or no issue. Choice is a matter of competing forces that exist on a spectrum. For example, I could put a gun to your head and tell you that I'll 'give you a choice': either drink this lethal cocktail or I'll blow your brains out. It's true, I've given you a choice; but it's not the choice you really want. The choice you want is under what conditions to survive, not under what conditions to perish. This isn't a choice between chocolate or raspberry ice cream.
I'm not even trying to suggest that working for an employer is like having a gun to your head. I promise I'm not trying to suggest that. But what I do want to get across is that 'at will' employment is a misleading concept. We do have choices about which employer to work for; but we don't have the choice to simply perish without a way of supporting ourselves and our families. And when employers, large, medium, and small, across different sectors of work, largely enforce the same kinds of restrictive office policies and employment conditions, our choices really don't mean as much as it sounds like when we say to ourselves 'yeah, but at least I have a choice.' Maybe it's more like shit-flavored ice cream or urine-flavored ice cream for most Americans.
After all, it's not exactly news that most of us really don't like our jobs. There are plenty of people out there--probably your bosses and your trust-fund buddies and your grandpa--who will tell you that this generation (whichever one it is) has gone soft, and people aren't supposed to like their work, and that's just life, etc. These are the people who are invested in you doing hard work for them, giving up your freedom for them, because maybe they already gave up most of their lives to spend their 50s with marginally more freedom to boss your sorry ass around. I would suggest: the hell with that attitude. You probably started working as a teenager. You're going to die around age 78. You probably won't retire before age 67. What are you doing with your life?
Don't get me wrong. Many of us--a privileged few--really love our jobs. I love my job. If I couldn't do my job, I don't know what I'd do with myself, retirement or not. To me there are few things more satisfying than doing excellent work that you can be proud of. Honestly. But in my case I know that the hard work I do is something I have a direct stake in, that I believe in, that allows me to sleep soundly (less than 8 hours). This is to say I have nothing against hard work nor ambition. Far from it. But I don't work in a Labor Compound. I don't have to be somewhere all the time because someone demands it. I set my own deadlines. And perhaps most importantly, I'm no one's boss. I don't rely upon the oppression or exploitation of someone else in order to succeed in what I do.
Before this gets too self-righteous, I want to clarify: I don't think everyone should or even requires the work conditions that I have to be satisfied. What I do think, however, is that the work conditions for too many people are not satisfying enough.
We trudge on with this Enlightenment idea that our government is the primary threat to our freedom. I think this is incredibly naive. This is a new world in which the government and the private sector are barely extricable, and in which the drivers of legislation are not individuals and individual rights, but employers and corporate rights. It's time to ask who really governs you, day to day; who really restricts your freedom as a human being to flourish in the pursuit of happiness? We've been fighting our government on the traditional front while our employers, collectively, have swept around and surrounded us from every other angle. Saying that we 'have a choice' in avoiding oppressive labor conditions would be like saying we 'have a choice' to defect from society, break the mandatory social contract, and live separately in utopian communes to escape government regulation. Neither of these is any more realistic than the other.
I needn't go through a litany of points on this issue, like how much corporate and special-interest lobbying drown out the voice of individuals in the democratic (say that with a straight face) process, how much consumer culture is tailored to give us something to do (buy) because we have so little time and energy in our daily lives to actually contemplate what it is we truly love to do when we're not working. I should remark that it's a damn shame that we invest so much of our thinking into our jobs that all that's left to do at the end of the day is 'zone out' with some reality TV nonsense or some grocery shopping (I can have one of 153234 choices of snack cracker! Thanks income!). But otherwise I'm not going to get into all that here.
Despite all of this, we do have some choice in the matter. We can employ our government to give us greater rights as employees. And we can start answering the question of what to do to earn a living not by chasing after a high income for low freedom, but by directing our talents and efforts toward industries that treat employees better, that allow for more freedom and flexibility in and beyond the workplace, and that exist to produce things of concrete value for the world (rather than to further a labor-consumption hamster wheel). Of course, none of this will be enough to combat the asinine orthodoxy of endless commercial growth for the sake of endless growth itself. But it's a start.
1) They wake up early to report for labor; failure to report on time results in censure.
2) They cannot leave the Labor Compound until a supervisor or a judgmental cadre of fellow laborers says so, usually after having labored at Labor Compound for the duration of the day and part of the night.
3) They sleep 8 hours of a 24-hour day, work for Labor Compound 8 hours/day, and dedicate 2-3 hours/day to exercising limited freedom to do what they choose.
4) They are tagged with tracking censors which collect data on where they go, whom they interact with, and what they do during all hours at the Labor Compound. This data is reported to supervisors who use it to further manipulate the conditions of labor in the Compound.
5) Their Labor Compound supervisors enforce strict policies dictating the emotional state of their laborers. Laborers who fail to demonstrate happiness with their labor on the Compound are censured.
6) Their Labor Compound supervisors rig computers in the Labor Compound to censor content on the Internet to limit access for laborers.
7) They are subject to drug testing by their Labor Compound supervisors, even if they've never been suspected of, accused of, or prosecuted for illegal drug use.
8) Their access to healthcare is determined by their Labor Compound.
9) Their obligations to the Labor Compounds determine whether and under what conditions they can have children.
10) They can be dismissed from the Labor Compound for any reason, at the will of Compound supervisors.
These being the case, we haven't even gotten to the sad part. The sad part is that if I asked you whether these policies were more prevalent in China or North Korea, you'd think seriously about the question. The sad part is that if I asked you if these were appropriate living conditions for someone who values individual freedom and democracy, you'd say absolutely not.
What's even sadder is that if I told you these conditions were imposed and enforced by a government, you'd be outraged; but if I told you these conditions were imposed and enforced by an employer, you'd shrug your shoulders.
You might pause and consider the fact that, regardless of who's imposing these conditions, these conditions are the reality for a vast majority of Americans. Land of the free, home of the brave, is it?
You're probably thinking: wait a minute, I'm an employee 'at will' (if you're thinking like an attorney); I have the choice to work or not to work under such conditions. This is different from a scenario in which the government mandates that I do these things, against my will, and by the force of law, and of sovereign power.
You're right in this respect. These are indeed two very different scenarios (even though, in practice, they produce very comparable realities). The thing about choice, however, is it's not (ironically) a yes or no issue. Choice is a matter of competing forces that exist on a spectrum. For example, I could put a gun to your head and tell you that I'll 'give you a choice': either drink this lethal cocktail or I'll blow your brains out. It's true, I've given you a choice; but it's not the choice you really want. The choice you want is under what conditions to survive, not under what conditions to perish. This isn't a choice between chocolate or raspberry ice cream.
I'm not even trying to suggest that working for an employer is like having a gun to your head. I promise I'm not trying to suggest that. But what I do want to get across is that 'at will' employment is a misleading concept. We do have choices about which employer to work for; but we don't have the choice to simply perish without a way of supporting ourselves and our families. And when employers, large, medium, and small, across different sectors of work, largely enforce the same kinds of restrictive office policies and employment conditions, our choices really don't mean as much as it sounds like when we say to ourselves 'yeah, but at least I have a choice.' Maybe it's more like shit-flavored ice cream or urine-flavored ice cream for most Americans.
After all, it's not exactly news that most of us really don't like our jobs. There are plenty of people out there--probably your bosses and your trust-fund buddies and your grandpa--who will tell you that this generation (whichever one it is) has gone soft, and people aren't supposed to like their work, and that's just life, etc. These are the people who are invested in you doing hard work for them, giving up your freedom for them, because maybe they already gave up most of their lives to spend their 50s with marginally more freedom to boss your sorry ass around. I would suggest: the hell with that attitude. You probably started working as a teenager. You're going to die around age 78. You probably won't retire before age 67. What are you doing with your life?
Don't get me wrong. Many of us--a privileged few--really love our jobs. I love my job. If I couldn't do my job, I don't know what I'd do with myself, retirement or not. To me there are few things more satisfying than doing excellent work that you can be proud of. Honestly. But in my case I know that the hard work I do is something I have a direct stake in, that I believe in, that allows me to sleep soundly (less than 8 hours). This is to say I have nothing against hard work nor ambition. Far from it. But I don't work in a Labor Compound. I don't have to be somewhere all the time because someone demands it. I set my own deadlines. And perhaps most importantly, I'm no one's boss. I don't rely upon the oppression or exploitation of someone else in order to succeed in what I do.
Before this gets too self-righteous, I want to clarify: I don't think everyone should or even requires the work conditions that I have to be satisfied. What I do think, however, is that the work conditions for too many people are not satisfying enough.
We trudge on with this Enlightenment idea that our government is the primary threat to our freedom. I think this is incredibly naive. This is a new world in which the government and the private sector are barely extricable, and in which the drivers of legislation are not individuals and individual rights, but employers and corporate rights. It's time to ask who really governs you, day to day; who really restricts your freedom as a human being to flourish in the pursuit of happiness? We've been fighting our government on the traditional front while our employers, collectively, have swept around and surrounded us from every other angle. Saying that we 'have a choice' in avoiding oppressive labor conditions would be like saying we 'have a choice' to defect from society, break the mandatory social contract, and live separately in utopian communes to escape government regulation. Neither of these is any more realistic than the other.
I needn't go through a litany of points on this issue, like how much corporate and special-interest lobbying drown out the voice of individuals in the democratic (say that with a straight face) process, how much consumer culture is tailored to give us something to do (buy) because we have so little time and energy in our daily lives to actually contemplate what it is we truly love to do when we're not working. I should remark that it's a damn shame that we invest so much of our thinking into our jobs that all that's left to do at the end of the day is 'zone out' with some reality TV nonsense or some grocery shopping (I can have one of 153234 choices of snack cracker! Thanks income!). But otherwise I'm not going to get into all that here.
Despite all of this, we do have some choice in the matter. We can employ our government to give us greater rights as employees. And we can start answering the question of what to do to earn a living not by chasing after a high income for low freedom, but by directing our talents and efforts toward industries that treat employees better, that allow for more freedom and flexibility in and beyond the workplace, and that exist to produce things of concrete value for the world (rather than to further a labor-consumption hamster wheel). Of course, none of this will be enough to combat the asinine orthodoxy of endless commercial growth for the sake of endless growth itself. But it's a start.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
The Twisted Republican Politics of 'Sequester'
The politics surrounding the infamous 'sequester' are so convoluted that they merit a brief unraveling. Where to begin?
Let's start with what each party actually wants. Both parties want to reduce the budget deficit. The Democrats want to do so by closing tax loopholes that benefit the very wealthy. Republicans want to do so by cutting government programs and expenditures.
Now let's look at what the sequester does and does not do. The sequester cuts government programs and expenditures. The sequester does not close tax loopholes that benefit the very wealthy.
You've certainly heard both sides blame the other for the sequester and its effects. Republicans argue that Obama and the Democrats failed to provide the leadership to avert the sequester. The Democrats argue that Republicans in Congress failed to compromise to avert the sequester.
Here's the thing about blame: you don't blame someone for doing something awesome. You blame someone for doing something bad. So when Republicans blame Obama for allowing to happen precisely what Republicans wanted to happen, you have to scratch your head.
Despite the fact that ordained Republican budget champion Paul Ryan has long since argued in favor of sequester as a means to reduce the deficit, Ryan and other Republicans are now wagging their fingers at the president for allowing the sequester to happen.
Now, you might argue, sequestration brings about cuts abruptly, rather than over a planned, controlled period; so it's not hypocritical to want to reduce government programs and expenditures but also to oppose sequestration. That's true; but then again, Republicans have been campaigning on slashing entire government departments for years. These are the same politicians who held the US government credit rating hostage, who held the operating budget of the US government hostage, who held the US economy hostage in a series of hostage-taking scenarios called things like 'fiscal cliff.' Nobody in their right mind should believe for a second that 'sequestration' is any different: Republicans filibustered (which is to say prevented a vote on) a Senate bill to avoid sequestration that had a majority vote in pocket. For Republicans, sequestration is not a catastrophe to be avoided, but a deliberate plan to force the very government spending cuts that they've wanted all along. This is not a party that's above risking economic tumult or even economic ruin in order to further its ideology about what, and on what, the government should or shouldn't spend.
I'm actually not convinced, as so many Democratic politicos are, that sequestration will wreck the US economy, just as I wasn't convinced that the 'fiscal cliff' or the downgrading of our credit rating would either. People will lose jobs and will struggle for it, but it will be nothing like the economic havoc wrought by the private sector in recent years. The greater concern, I think, is the fact that a majority of legislators supported a plan to avoid sequestration, and yet the vote never happened. There are a number of very easy solutions to the problem of the abuse of the filibuster, yet no one on either side of the aisle seems interested in fixing our Congressional rules such that the legislature can actually have up or down votes on bills, which is to say so that the legislature can proceed with the business of legislating.
The filibuster should be the big story here; not how much both sides hate each other, nor some general and ineffectual condemnation of a synecdoche, Congress, and its effect on an abstraction, the economy.
Let's start with what each party actually wants. Both parties want to reduce the budget deficit. The Democrats want to do so by closing tax loopholes that benefit the very wealthy. Republicans want to do so by cutting government programs and expenditures.
Now let's look at what the sequester does and does not do. The sequester cuts government programs and expenditures. The sequester does not close tax loopholes that benefit the very wealthy.
You've certainly heard both sides blame the other for the sequester and its effects. Republicans argue that Obama and the Democrats failed to provide the leadership to avert the sequester. The Democrats argue that Republicans in Congress failed to compromise to avert the sequester.
Here's the thing about blame: you don't blame someone for doing something awesome. You blame someone for doing something bad. So when Republicans blame Obama for allowing to happen precisely what Republicans wanted to happen, you have to scratch your head.
Despite the fact that ordained Republican budget champion Paul Ryan has long since argued in favor of sequester as a means to reduce the deficit, Ryan and other Republicans are now wagging their fingers at the president for allowing the sequester to happen.
Now, you might argue, sequestration brings about cuts abruptly, rather than over a planned, controlled period; so it's not hypocritical to want to reduce government programs and expenditures but also to oppose sequestration. That's true; but then again, Republicans have been campaigning on slashing entire government departments for years. These are the same politicians who held the US government credit rating hostage, who held the operating budget of the US government hostage, who held the US economy hostage in a series of hostage-taking scenarios called things like 'fiscal cliff.' Nobody in their right mind should believe for a second that 'sequestration' is any different: Republicans filibustered (which is to say prevented a vote on) a Senate bill to avoid sequestration that had a majority vote in pocket. For Republicans, sequestration is not a catastrophe to be avoided, but a deliberate plan to force the very government spending cuts that they've wanted all along. This is not a party that's above risking economic tumult or even economic ruin in order to further its ideology about what, and on what, the government should or shouldn't spend.
I'm actually not convinced, as so many Democratic politicos are, that sequestration will wreck the US economy, just as I wasn't convinced that the 'fiscal cliff' or the downgrading of our credit rating would either. People will lose jobs and will struggle for it, but it will be nothing like the economic havoc wrought by the private sector in recent years. The greater concern, I think, is the fact that a majority of legislators supported a plan to avoid sequestration, and yet the vote never happened. There are a number of very easy solutions to the problem of the abuse of the filibuster, yet no one on either side of the aisle seems interested in fixing our Congressional rules such that the legislature can actually have up or down votes on bills, which is to say so that the legislature can proceed with the business of legislating.
The filibuster should be the big story here; not how much both sides hate each other, nor some general and ineffectual condemnation of a synecdoche, Congress, and its effect on an abstraction, the economy.
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