Thursday, September 27, 2012

I Hear There's Been Discontent with the NFL ...

When I made the decision in August to give up college football, I also decided to throw in the NFL as well.  So, just I have not been paying attention to college football, I have equally not been paying attention to the NFL.  I didn't even know that the NFL referees had been locked out until I happened, while reading about other sports, to see a story about it heading into the first week of the NFL season.

Meanwhile, while I wasn't watching, many who have been watching have apparently voiced their discontent following the game this past Monday, using, as Michael Butterworth has noted, the language of armageddon.

Frankly, I don't care a whole heck of a lot about "botched" or otherwise controversial calls.  I suppose it's good that fans have voiced their outrage, but I'm happy that I wasn't even watching in the first place.  Remember -- the NFL locked out its referees; the referees did not strike.  And then, while locking out the referees, the NFL hired replacements ...

This does, I think, as Butterworth suggests, offer "a glimpse into our eschatological future."  And I think it's telling about our present and potentially that future that the articulation of discontent came now and not when the NFL locked out the referees.  It's telling because it reflects the worrisome disregard for the place of labor in the United States and the troubling adherence to the corporate organizational structure that has become so entrenched in U.S. society. When are folks upset?  Apparently only when the product they want suffers, not when the folks who make that product do.

The NFL is a high-stakes corporation, and it seems to have all of the oppressive side effects of such an organization.  In other words, I don't regret giving it up at all ...

Monday, September 3, 2012

Building a Society

In recent weeks, much has been made of a comment by President Obama in which he said, "You didn't build that."  With the statement pulled from its context, many folks have taken exception to it, particularly people who have suggested that the statement dismisses or devalues the hard work that people put into building businesses.  This theme featured prominently at the Republican National Convention this past week.  It even served as context for a bakery in Virginia to turn away Vice President Joe Biden.

I'm certainly not the first to comment on Obama's statement and the context of the statement and/or to offer a counter-criticism of the complaints about the statement.  Heck, the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign were, as one would expect, quick to jump on that.  Yet, on this Labor Day, I want to touch on one aspect of those complaints.  In the speech in which Obama made this statement, he was talking about all of the various things that helped people be in positions to build their businesses.  They were taught by other people.  The roads they used were built by other people.  And so on ... Again, plenty of other folks have already covered that.  I want to focus, though, on how these complaints reflect on laborers.

As the story above about comments from the Republican National Convention demonstrates, these complaints take part in a tradition of thought focused on individualism.  They build out of a myth of the American Dream in which people build success in their own lives out of their own hard work and effort.  And they then argue that Obama's comment flies in the face of the logic of that mythology.

Yet, in the process of suggesting that their work should be valued, these complaints belie a particularly troubling self-centeredness.  Yes, insofar as we place value on labor, the work that one puts into creating and developing an organization warrants recognition.  Yet, anyone who thinks that they are alone in that process is either rather naive or rather uncaring.  In addition to the teachers, road builders, and others to whom Obama was referring when making the comment, businesses don't make it without employees.  Sure, some employees work harder than others, some have more commitment to their jobs than others, and so on, but individuals who perform labor allow organizations to succeed.  Without people doing the day-to-day tasks that any organization needs, the organization does not function and, thus, does not succeed.  Still, in the U.S. we're quick to deny these individuals much recognition.  Focus placed on things like "business leadership" invoke the idea that executives and owners of businesses provided the means for businesses to be profitable and, as such, they deserve large sums of money and large amounts of social and political power.  We then hear how that's their money--they earned it, and they should be able to do with it as they wish.

Except that they didn't earn it all by themselves.  When someone like Terrence Pegula has $88 million available to donate to Penn State hockey programs and still has $189 million left to buy the Buffalo Sabres, he got that money from investing in something.  And, in this particular case, he got it from sale of an oil and gas company that he owned (and which, by the way, made considerable money from fracking).  People worked for him in that company, doing many of the tasks, often very dirty tasks, that made that possible.  Yet, where are they in getting to have a say in the use of that money and the priorities used when doling it out?

In the end, the U.S. gives plenty of credit to business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives who run organizations.  Indeed, the Mitt Romney presidential campaign is centered on the idea that that's what makes someone qualified to be president, and Romney is far from alone among politicians from various sides in articulating such a sentiment.  We do just fine in recognizing their contributions.  On the other hand, we are much less effective in recognizing the labor that accompanied these folks' contributions.  When business owners complain that Obama's comment devalues their work because they did build their companies, as if they did it themselves, they're succumbing to the rather self-centered, undemocratic notion that lies at the heart of our ineffectiveness in recognizing the contributions of laborers.

For every business owner out there who takes exception to Obama's "You didn't build that" statement, there are scores of laborers who helped those business owners build what they are acting like they built themselves.  On this Labor Day -- this day of all days on which we are asked to think about the contributions of laborers to our society -- it seems like a good time to reflect on that a little bit more.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

How I Fared in My First Weekend Without College Football

Thursday, as the college football season was beginning, I wrote about why I could not in good conscience watch the sport anymore, despite enjoying it quite it a lot over the past couple of decades.  Well, after the first Saturday of the season, I can truthfully say that I did not watch or, with one small but important exception that I will note momentarily, follow along with any college football games over the past three days.  As I expected, though, it was difficult.  On Friday morning, as I checked the Arizona State University website to read other news, I saw that one of my alma maters, Arizona State, won big over Northern Arizona on Thursday night.  Because I haven't been following the sport, I hadn't even realized that ASU played Thursday night.  Seeing a headline about it gave me a small twinge of longing to have watched a bit of the game.

On Saturday morning, while checking other sports news on espn.com while eating my breakfast, I saw that Michigan State -- another of my alma maters and the team from among the big six conferences that I have most rooted for and identified with over the past 15 years -- won a close and apparently exciting game over Boise State on Friday night in what appears to have been billed as an opening weekend heavyweight matchup.  Again, I had not even realized that Michigan State had played Friday night or had opened with Boise State.  Had I been following the sport, I would have known this and probably would have watched, and so on Saturday morning, reading about this, I felt quite a lot more longing for college football.

Then, during the say on Saturday, as I logged into Facebook a few times, I saw people using their Facebook status to provide updates on the game between Bowling Green and Florida.  Apparently, Bowling Green scored first, was in the tie with Florida at 14 points apiece in the second half, and hung in well against an opponent that was expected to demolish them.  I learned all of these things from other folks' Facebook updates, and this is when I had the biggest longing of all.  It was very hard not to turn on the television and see if I could watch.  This is when I most started stretching the boundaries of my pact, as twice I went to espn.com, eventually to read stories about tennis, golf, and auto racing, but also, to be honest, as an opportunity to look to the upper left quickly and see the BGSU-Florida score.  It was hard to stop there, and it took a lot of my might not to do more to keep up with the game.

Then, last night, while surfing the net for some reading material while eating something, I saw the headline for this story on the main page of usatoday.com.  Since my checks of espn.com when I glanced at the BGSU-Florida score also meant that I saw headlines indicating that the Nittany Lions had lost to Ohio University, I already knew the outcome of the game.  And, since this was a commentary on Penn State and not a game story, I decided to read the piece.  I'm glad I did, because while reading some of the signs from the Penn State game that are listed in the piece and while reading the tone of moving on from what happened at Penn State that the piece reflects, this story strengthened my resolve.  It feels as if we have learned nothing from what happened at Penn State, nothing about how football occupies an inappropriate place in the structures of universities, and nothing about ourselves.

We are addicts.  We have become addicted to college football, and my own behavior on Saturday demonstrated it.  Like someone addicted to alcohol who finds a way to justify one drink at a social gathering or someone addicted to gambling who starts drawing distinctions between gambling for money and gambling without money, I was already on the first Saturday of the college football season looking for ways to skirt my own commitment to quit the habit.  And as many an addiction program will tell us, the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem.

A major reason why college football is able to keep driving the ship at universities around the country is because so many of us have a problem.  We've become addicted to it.  We spend gobs of money on it, we spend considerable time with it, and we allow it to have heavy influence on so many other parts of our lives.  In the name of this addiction, we justify all kinds of things that we really have no business justifying, from boys being abused at Penn State to allocation of financial resources away from academic programs to a bunch of other things along the way.  As I keep saying, this is a matter of priorities, and like an individual, when a society is addicted, its priorities are out of whack.

I learned this opening college football weekend a little more about the depths to which my priorities have been out of whack.  I was then reminded in the story on usatoday.com how widespread those misplaced priorities are.  I largely made it through the first few days of the college football season with my commitment not to follow the sport intact, yet the ways in which I circumvented that commitment are deeply telling.  I have work to do to relinquish college football's hold on me, and I feel pretty sure that I'm far from alone.