Great White Hope: The National Martin Luther King Memorial

Char Roone Miller
George Mason University


The U.S. census recentlyreported that the incomegap between the richest and the poorest in the United States has doubledsince 1968 (from a ratio of 7.69 to 1 to 14.5-to-1 in 2010), the United Statesis currently active in not one butthree major wars, and there are more black men in American prisonstoday than there were slaves in 1850. You don’t need a crystal ball, or a giant granite one, to know MartinLuther King’s response to this condition.

In spite of the justifiable andtouching power the new Martin Luther KingMemorial on the National Mall in D.C. takes from our nostalgia for theCivil Rights Movement of the 1960s, it fails to move us any closer tounderstanding or realizing how a living monument to King's dream requires ourresistance to militaristic and economic forms of oppression.  The Memorial whitewashes any sense of King asactivist, disrupter of power structures, and critic of economic systems.  It hides the struggle demanded by King.

A figural 30 ft-tall sculptureof MLK emerges partially formed from a block of granite, called The Stone ofHope, which appears to be the middle third of a giant boulder, sliced out andpushed from between the other two slabs of rock—The Mountain of Despair—towardsthe tidal basin on the National Mall. The colossal white granite memorial, located at the cartoonish addressof 1964 Independence Ave., SW DC, sternly faces the Jefferson Memorial, withits back towards the Lincoln.

None of the fourteen quotationscarved into the wide marble wall that arcs around and behind the statue of Kingrefers directly to King's work against economic injustice.  One quotation, from his Nobel Prizeacceptance speech, does suggest the audacity of his desire that all peoplereceive three meals a day. Unfortunately, this phrase becomes a touching platitude when removedfrom demands for state action or public policy. The architect carved two additional quotations onto the sides of thestatue of King, including one that has provoked significant criticism in whichKing appears to be describing himself as a “drum major for justice.” 

King’s original quotation suggested that hedidn’t mind being deprecated in the service of the cause even if critics wantedto call him a “drum major for justice.” Exactly the meaning suggested by the redaction; Maya Angelou said thatedit made King look like an "arroganttwit."  The Foundation missedthe point, but, worse, they missed an opportunity and wasted valuable spacewith a clichéd phrase, when King authored so many pithy statements ofpurpose.  King's remarks, for example,concerning the seat of the national government are remarkably appropriate fordisplay in Washington DC:  “We will placethe problems of the poor at the seat of government of the wealthiest nation inthe history of mankind.”  The statementsdisplayed on the memorial fail to provide much meaning to King’s vision, evenas they strategically lack any reference to his economic demands.

This shouldn’t be toosurprising.  In spite of their repeatedattempts to destroy organized labor, suppress wages, and general success atshifting wealth to the very rich, major corporations paid for thismemorial.  Coke, Ford, Target,ExxonMobil, BP, FannieMae, JPMorgan Chase @ Co., NFL, McDonalds, and LehmanBrothers all donated to the Memorial and are listed on the majorcontributors page.  General Motorsdonated $10 million.   Wall-Mart gave $1million. The Foundation proudly proclaims the faith these major donors have inKing’s dream.  “By their generoussupport,” the website proclaims, “they’ve demonstrated something trulyremarkable.  They’ve shown the breadth ofsupport that exists for Dr. King’s vision, from the man on the street toboardrooms on the fiftieth floor.”

Thoseboardrooms, high above the people occupying the street, did not offer large donationsin order to memorialize the fact that King was assassinated in 1968 while inMemphis supporting striking sanitation workers; that just days after herhusband’s murder Coretta Scott King and 42,000 people peacefully marchedthrough Memphis to demand that the Mayor of Memphis recognize the sanitationworker’s union; that at the time of his assassination King was hard at work onthe Poor People’s Campaign.   Neither Walmart nor Target,companies that have dedicated massive financial resources to fighting laborunions, could be expected to memorialize King’s vision for the power oforganized labor.  Certainly not Coke, with its history of fighting unions inGuatemala and accusations that the company has used prison labor in China, andits probable complicity in the death of union organizers in Columbia.  These donors, I claim, paid for a Memorialthat would help us forget that the revolution, as GilScott-Heron sang, "does not go better with Coke."  They got what they paid for; the Memorialdoes not offer any sense of the stern criticism King would certainly directtoward the labor practices of many of these companies.  The problem is not that they gave money forthe Memorial, it’s that the Memorial fails to display the conflict thosedonations have with King’s labor advocacy. “We call our demonstration acampaign for jobs and income,” King wrote, “because we feel that the economicquestion is the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, areconfronting.” (A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writingsand Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., Pages 67-69) Simply allowing the Memorial todeliver King’s message concerning the importance of organized labor on amonument paid for by labor busters would offer a better representation of thestruggle that King advocated.

Corporations were not the onlydonors, nor were they the only donors with labor policies in serious conflictwith King's struggle.  The Memorial, asmany have remarked, was created in China.   The Chinese government, probably the largestsingle donor to the memorial, gave the foundation $25 million--the U.S.government only gave $10 million in matching funds.  The Foundation naively denies that theChinese donation influenced their decision to create the memorial inChina.  Union representatives in theUnited States protested the contract with China and eventually received apromise from Johnson that union labor would be used to assemble the monument inthe United States.  Then in September oflast year, the union discovered that the Foundation had reneged on this writtenpromise and that unpaid workers from China were working on the Memorial.  Harry S. Johnson, president and CEO of theMemorial Foundation, evoked a hypocritical claim toracial harmony to hide the issue of economic exploitation. On September 8, theFoundation asserted:  “While 95% of thework is being done by American workers, we strongly believe that we should notexclude anyone from working on this project simply because of their religious beliefs,social background or country of origin.”

TheFoundation consistently gestured toward pluralism and artistic integrity tomake the exploitative dimension of their economic choices disappear.  According to Ed Jackson Jr., the ExecutiveArchitect on the project: “The granitefor King's statue was chosen because when lit at night, it lends a brownishtone to King's likeness. The stone, however, only exists in China.” though, headded, “some wanted it to come from the United States.”  All the white marble on the National Mall,whether from China, Italy or New Hampshire, gets darker when the sun goesdown.  Jackson’s ridiculous claim aboutthe color of the statue raises another, more obvious, question:  why not use black granite? Martin Luther Kingwas Black. 

Birmingham, Alabama King Memorial

TheFoundation’s decision to represent Dr. King in white granite treats the colorof his skin as a peripheral issue, when in fact it made King who he was.  King certainly looked to a time when peopleno longer made judgments of value based on the color of skin but in the UnitedStates white has never been the neutral absence of color. That the Foundationchose white as an abstracted representation of King continues, regrettably, thesocial positioning of whiteness as neutral, which requires the production ofother colors as derivative or deviant.

Theassertion, given broad currency in the 1960s, that “black is beautiful”highlights a politics of aesthetic taste. The color and shape of the statue ofKing appears as a visual and sensual event. The body with its attractions (ofcolor, shape, size, strength, weakness, etc.) functions as a political triggerfor desire and emulation.  Plenty of ourresponses to the appearance of the human body are beyond and before ourunderstanding of actions, arguments, and behaviors. Such responses are animportant part of our political life. Monuments operate in this field. King’s physical appearance moves us; King deserved a monument that wouldmove us. 

Binghamton, New York King Memorial

Tobuild a colossal statue to King on the Mall is to represent him in many of theterms that have solidified white male privilege (with its connections tonational and imperial forms of domination). The representation of emperors,kings, and presidents in sculptural form often presented the leader astranscending the limits of the body.  Itis undoubtedly an important moment when the body of the son of a Blackpreacher, himself the son of a sharecropper, appears as a giant white god. 

Itis inescapably necessary to represent King in earlier categories of power andvalue but the valuable struggle comes in using that positioning to undercut theborrowed hierarchy. Borrow the trappings of power but only to transform theterms of success. Take some money from Coke but spend that money to support theColumbian food workers union, SINALTRAINAL.  This Memorial fails because it never displaysthe struggle necessary for political life. King’s life was a life of this struggle.

King's arrest for 'loitering,' 1958

It’sexciting to see Martin Luther King Jr. occupying such select space on theNational Mall but we can’t afford to loose his critiques of the forms of valueand prestige that the Mall and its Memorials represent.  Lehman Brothers and Coke may have paid forthis Memorial but the real monument to King are the activists occupying Wall Street and DC in an attempt to transform notions ofprivilege and power through conflict and struggle.

Baseball, Leisure, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book, Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age, will be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in August.

Periodically I fall asleep while watching a late night baseball game from the west coast. I have invested in a Major League Baseball package that allows me to choose almost any game every night, but by far the preferred choice is Dodger games. I am a fan of announcers as much as teams. And the former are more stable than the latter, which have become interchangeable parts on a money- driven merry-go-round. My choice of Dodger games owes nothing to Brooklyn or Los Angeles loyalty but rather to appreciation of and fascination with the voice of the Dodgers, Vin Scully.  

I have been especially attentive to Dodger games this season. Prior to the start of the season, Scully had announced that this would be his last as Dodger broadcaster. The other night, however, Scully surprised us, albeit with a characteristically soft-spoken announcement.

An admirer had a long tradition of sending him chocolate chip cookies, and this year her gift was accompanied by a note that the cookies were a bribe to entice him to return for another season. As I drifted off to sleep, I expected him to thank her and then explain why the time had come to hang up the microphone. His response, that he would return for his 63d season, both jolted me out of my sleep and led to some reflections on age and retirement. Even if he really loves those cookies, Scully is returning to the booth because he is healthy and loves his job. Many older Americans toil on also out of love for the office, even when they could easily afford to choose the golf course. Sadly, however, an increasing number, even in declining health, are forced to keep working due to America's inadequate social protections not out of love for their work; this is where we all as a society strike out.

Scully is both typical and atypical of his generation. As an announcer, he is without equal. For me he almost defines the genre. Unlike any other announcer today, Scully works alone, with no ex- player to provide the 'color' commentary. And hype is not his style. For him, no baseball game determines the future of western civilization. His commentary resembles a quiet, literate conversation with his listeners. The other day he congratulated both Japan and Huntington Beach for their long run in the Little League World Series. Both had played great ball, but only one could win. 'It's a game, after all.'

Scully reminds me of Ernie Harwell, long- time radio voice of the Detroit Tigers and a fixture of my youth. Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson has commented that the LA Dodgers 

boasted sports' greatest, most literate and entertaining broadcaster, Vin Scully. (I've long believed that kids who grew up listening to Scully got at least a 30-point bump on their verbal SAT.) Always the most spatially and governmentally scattered of cities --- there are 88 municipalities in Los Angeles County --- L.A. lacked most forms of common civic identity until half the town began listening to Scully.

Like Harwell's, Scully's commentary is peppered with stories about the players' lives and families. Recently during a scorching Sunday afternoon from Dodger Stadium, Scully regaled us with tales of how players used wet mattresses and cabbage under their hats to cool off in pre-airconditioning times. As with all modern commentators, he has a plethora of statistics upon which to draw, but he does not overwhelm the fan with numbers. I especially appreciate several features that seem unique to his broadcasts. When a runner lands on third, Scully will invariably inform us of the number of wild pitches the pitcher has committed over the season. And when pitchers bat he tell us what percentage of the time they have struck out, a figure that gives a better sense than mere batting average as to whether or not they are klutzes at the plate. My favorite Scully touch is a sixth inning feature, 'This Day in Dodger Baseball,' wherein he tells a story of an event or personality in the long history of the Dodgers, stories often drawn on his own conversations with the players.
  Longevity in the US has increased and seniors are working longer, both out of choice and necessity. Nonetheless, I bristle at the increasingly popular idea that because longevity has increased and many seniors are doing excellent work well into their eighties, it is no big deal if the Social Security retirement age were to be increased from 65 to 67.

I look around my own working class community with its fishermen, boat builders, carpenters. Despite talk of post-industrial society, much work remains physical and is literally back-breaking. (Such service professions as nursing carry enormous physical and emotional burdens.) And increases in longevity, as Dean Baker has pointed out, are heavily class- skewed. Upper class citizens have more control over their work environments, generally do less physically stressful work, and have better and more regular access to quality medical care. Increasing the retirement age is another attack on the wallets and the health of poor and working class citizens, often depriving them of the few years of retirement to which they can look forward.

  Baker also points out that any social security shortfalls, which are exaggerated to begin with, could be alleviated by removing the cap on earned income subject to social security taxation. Much as I like Vin Scully, I believe he and other well compensated professionals working long years at jobs they love should see all of their income taxed, just as is the case for my neighbors, most of whom have few choices about their work.

  In a broader sense, the issue of retirement raises profound questions about modern capitalism.At least as far back as the twenties, capitalism's most outspoken defenders promised a future of both material gains and more free time for all. And indeed, despite US capitalism's frequent failures to tap its full human and technological potential, worker productivity has greatly increased. Yet for a quarter century Americans have seen stagnant incomes, longer workloads and no opportunity to trade any wage gains for increases in leisure or earlier retirements.

Source: The New York Times, Sept 4, 2011

Preserving and lowering the social security retirement age and taxing all earned income would be a small step in the right direction. But for now I am pleased that Vince Scully will stay another year so that I can use my own leisure time to revisit and refashion my memories of the summer game.

News Corporation and American Democracy

John Buell
John Buell (jbuell@acadia.net) is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book, Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age, will be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in August.

Will Rupert Murdoch's public humiliation end with the indictment of his son and deposing both as leaders of News Corporation? Murdoch is of course a larger than life figure, a modern day Citizen Kane, the movie character based in part on the life of the real media titan of his day, William Randolph Hearst. Hearst built a media empire through yellow journalism and relentless promotion of American empire. Murdoch has helped reshape modern media, not merely in terms of corporate consolidation or political leanings but also journalistic style and redefinition of the nature and limits of political argument. But though he has helped to define the role of media tycoon in the late twentieth and twenty first century, the evolution of capitalism and its political economy has itself reinforced and in turn been buttressed by his performance. Great actors inspire but also depend on engaged and receptive audiences.

Rupert Murdoch did not begin the process of media consolidation. A generation ago, media scholar and critic Ben Bagdikian highlighted the tendency of corporate media empires to achieve a high degree of both vertical and horizontal integration. (See his book, New Media Monopoly.) Diminishing numbers of corporate media controlled most of the market. In Britain, Murdoch has achieved an unprecedented degree of media consolidation.

That success of course owes something to Murdoch's ability to appeal to--and sow--the politics of backlash and jingoism. Murdoch had a cultural climate that proved receptive. The mainstream media of the sixties and seventies did indeed show some sympathy to growing concerns over racial justice and social issues. Radical critiques of corporate capitalism or sympathetic analyses of the plight of working class whites in an era of outsourcing, however, were hardly to be found. Murdoch had a perfect sweet spot to spread his right wing populism.

Murdoch's success has had other drivers as well. Like the large investment banks and defense contractors, he has depended on a symbiotic relationship with major political leaders. John Nichols points out: "Rupert Murdoch has manipulated not just the news but the news landscape of the United States for decades. He has done so by pressuring the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to alter the laws of the land and regulatory standards in order to give his media conglomerate an unfair advantage in 'competition' with more locally focused, more engaged and more responsible media. It's an old story: while Murdoch's Fox News hosts prattle on and on about their enthusiasm for the free market, they work for a firm that seeks to game the system so Murdoch's 'properties' are best positioned to monopolize the discourse." Murdoch is a prime example of the evolution of US capitalism toward a political economy that imposes market discipline on the poor even as it rewards and buttresses the power of the corporate winners and the wealthy.

Source: the Media Reform Information Center.

Nichols also asks if we should care about Murdoch's journalistic triumph. He suggests that the Murdoch scandal "raises huge questions about how news stories are and will be obtained in an era of new media and about the extent to which supposedly personal communications are private." These are certainly valid points, but a ruthless pursuit and exploitation of information about the private lives of its subjects has early precursors within the national security state itself. Think of J Edgar Hoover's accumulation of information about the sexual predilections of political leaders and his shameless deployment of these to bribe his nominal superiors.

Just as importantly, the corporate culture of News Corp reflected Murdoch's broader political ideals and affected its journalistic practices. Murdoch's notorious hostility to unions expressed itself in actions taken after high profile news takeovers at such papers as the New York Post and this in turn affected the editorial product. Michelle Chen comments: "Eavesdropping on voicemail or obtaining call logs was initially a money-saving measure" to get the scoop fast and cheap. That is, pressure to maximize profits contributed directly to the corruption of reporting practices." Reporters were subject to the same sort of speed up that shaped manufacturing assembly lines and still today is, as Harold Meyerson points out, a major driver of corporate profits even in the midst of the great recession.

More broadly, Murdoch feeds but also reflects a politics of demonization not unique to the United States but exceptionally potent here. Thus to a greater extent than in most modern democracies, such questions as whether one inhaled marijuana or had a mistress pass for informed and important political debate.

Fox reflects and amplifies another vital trend in the evolution of our politics. Naomi Klein's provocative Shock Doctrine suggests that the evolution of neoliberal capitalism with its market discipline for the many and rewards and subsidies for the well placed has depended on crisis. Thus 9/11 gave Bush extraordinary opportunities to reshape the economy and the national security state. Yet from my vantage point Klein underplays the role of the media in framing and fostering the sense of crisis. How is it that 9/11 evoked a far different response from the Oklahoma City bombing? A media that glorified Wall Street as the world's financial capital, that demonized Arabs, that viewed human history in Manichean terms played a crucial role.

The role of the media in shaping and defining crisis is even more obvious in the case of the current debt ceiling debate. The notion that the US is broke is absurd. If we are broke now, we were much more broke in the years following WWII. Yet in those years the US growth rate topped that of the Reagan era and the fruits of growth were much more equitably distributed. Nonetheless, Fox has been an amplification machine for the notion that the US is broke and government, just like today's families, must retrench. This analysis is only half right. Middle and working class families are broke, but the Federal Government can borrow money at historically low rates. If it does not borrow--or tax corporate and wealthy savings---and spend, we may be sunk.

Murdoch and his minions may face criminal charges. His singular ability to sense cultural vulnerabilities and ruthlessly to unearth and exploit personal failings or eccentricities has altered the media and political world. But neither our media nor our progressive politicians should indulge in anti-Murdoch vendettas and frame him as symbol and root of our troubles. True, he is an ideal villain and we love villains. But absent much stronger barriers to media consolidation and more opportunities for a diverse, citizen-journalist- and- consumer- directed media, where something other than advertiser dollars are the prime driver and motivation. Murdoch's demise will do us little good. Perhaps the role of the few remaining independent voices like the Guardian in exposing Murdoch and the truly ghastly practices to which News Corporation has stooped will help foster broad media and economic reform. (See http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/21/murdoch_empire_pummelled_by_phone_hacking).

If progressives' only success is to punish or remove Rupert Murdoch, we may be disappointed. The larger political economy he represents may survive and even grow with his fall. Gwynne Dwyer points out: "There is something called the "Murdoch discount." It is the gap between the market value of News Corporation as it is, and the considerably larger sum that it would be worth without Rupert Murdoch at the helm. (Bloomberg estimates that it would be 50 percent higher.)" But what is good for News Corporation stockholders may not be good enough for us.

Two, No, Make that One Cheer for Golf

Steven Johnston

University of South Florida

Patriotism is always on the lookout for new sources of support. Consider the United States in the late twentieth century. From the Vietnam War to the space shuttle Challenger, there’s no war patriotism can’t adopt or rehabilitate, no traumatic event it can’t use and convert into a heroic narrative or mawkish monument or memorial. This creativity is its genius. Don’t underestimate it. It’s even gotten its affective hooks into the otherwise staid game of golf. No resistance has been offered; if anything, golf has welcomed this usurpation.

On Father’s Day the United States Golf Association conducted the 111th version of the United States Open. NBC opened its Sunday coverage with some patriotic hoopla: children reciting the pledge of allegiance. Thanks to NBC’s editing, both “under God” and “indivisible” were cut. The reaction on social media was fast and furious and NBC prostrated itself on air. “We began our coverage of this final round just about three hours ago, and when we did it was our intent to begin the coverage of this U.S. Open championship with a feature that captured the patriotism of our national championship being held in our nation’s capital for the third time. Regrettably, a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance that was in that feature was edited out. It was not done to upset anyone, and we’d like to apologize to those of you who were offended by it.”

Apparently someone forgot to inform NBC of its broadcast location: Bethesda, Maryland. The Washington D.C. border and the nation’s capital are several miles away. More importantly, what does patriotism have to do with an individual pursuit like golf, even when it’s the United States Open? The eventual winner, Rory McIlroy, treated victory as the individual accomplishment it represents, pleased to be in the company of other great athletes and previous winners such as Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Arnold Palmer, and Ben Hogan. It was all about “history and prestige” in the sport. McIlroy hails from Northern Ireland, but the national flag someone offered him shortly after he won did not interest him and he declined to wrap it around himself as he walked off the course.

NBC’s U.S. Open effort to affix patriotism to golf followed its coverage of last year’s Ryder Cup, a golf competition between teams from the United States and Europe. Despite boasting the best professionals and the most competitive weekly tour, the United States has won only four of the last thirteen competitions. This generates great biannual concern in golfing and sporting circles in the United States. The game may not have been invented here, but the United States has made golf its own sporting property.

The huge popularity of the Ryder Cup (one of the world’s most watched athletic events) represents not just a remarkable sporting and media reversal but a downright triumph. Starting in the mid-nineteen twenties, the United Sates and Great Britain staged the biannual competition for fifty years and no one really noticed. The United States won each contest, usually handily, save one, 1969, which was deemed an aberration, even an act of charity. For the 1979 competition, Europe replaced Great Britain and by 1983 golf had a genuinely competitive international sporting spectacle, with political passion and hard feelings to match.

Triggered by competition, more specifically, a potent foreign enemy bent on acquiring global dominance, the Ryder Cup became a patriotic phenomenon. Professional in the United States rose to meet the threat. Players now covet a spot on the team. Despite the rivalries on the PGA Tour, where players such as Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, Ryder Cup stalwarts, openly disdain one another, American players express solidarity: they dress alike, practice together, socialize, and talk endlessly about the incomparable thrill of playing for their country, which, of course, they love. They never knew playing in the Ryder Cup could elicit such feeling. Remarkably, they are nothing if not sincere. Team uniforms (yes, golf uniforms) often involve red, white, and blue. Fans wave American flags en masse (at least when the event is held in the United States). Chants of USA! USA! USA! Or Europe! Europe! accompany victory. European patriotism may be in its infancy, but defeating a hated enemy, however artificially produced, resonates.

This is the stunning achievement of the Ryder Cup, for golf is an inherently individual pursuit. That is its attraction. It may be thought the sport of aristocrats, but it is played by many tens of millions of people around the world and its distance from the chauvinism of the Olympic Games, the World Cup, and other exercises in controlled national aggression recommend it. Golf was and is wonderfully isolating, even narcissistic, an exercise in self-overcoming. If you hate groups, this is the sport for you. Unlike team sports, your eventual success does not depend on teammates who may not be nearly as skilled as are you. It’s even anti-humanist. It’s you against a golf course.

The Ryder Cup makes professional golfers forget that they are, well, professional golfers, that is, selfish, pampered, overpaid, entitled, capitalist practitioners of a silly but fascinating game. Golf has no wider significance and this is its beauty. No more, perhaps, thanks to the Ryder Cup. Think of it as the pod-like power of patriotism. Golf still has a long way to go before it attains the cult status of football (what Americans call soccer). For one thing, golf measures success individually, by tournaments won (especially on the American tour), major championships in particular. Tiger Woods is chasing what was once thought to be (cliché alert) an unbreakable record: Jack Nicklaus’s total of eighteen major championships (a combination of the Masters, the United States Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship). This has been Woods’s goal since he was a small child, shorter than a golf club in fact. He may or may not surpass Nicklaus, but at the end of his career, talk will center on how many tournaments and how many majors he won. His Ryder Cup record will be irrelevant. The same is true for Nicklaus. No one knows his Ryder Cup record. What’s more, no one cares—not yet anyway. Golf is simply not a team sport let alone a national team sport, despite the existence of organized competition in high school and college. A few may know that Tiger Woods won the NCAA individual men’s championship in 1996, but no one knows (or cares) how Stanford, his alma mater, fared. Golf, moreover, is rightly known for its sportsmanship and integrity. Players do not root against one another and they self-report rules violations that no one else could possibly detect. This can cost them both victories and huge sums of money, but self-policing is part and parcel of the game.

The contrast with football is dramatic. Football players will do anything to win, whether it’s within the rules or not. The most recent World Cup demonstrated this, much to the outrage and national heartbreak of Ireland and Ghana. The rules of football encourage cheating. What do you have to lose, after all, if you can score or stop a game-winning goal by deflecting it with your hands? You give your team a chance to keep playing and become a national hero for ingenuity. You are a patriot. Just ask Thierry Henry of France and Luis Suarez of Uruguay. Football fans, likewise, are apparently capable of anything should their team not win. Andrés Escobar of Colombia was murdered after his own goal resulted in Colombia’s elimination from the 1994 World Cup.

Can golf survive the Ryder Cup’s appropriation? Will a sport defined by agonism become informed by antagonism? The signs are troubling. In the 1999 Ryder Cup at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, the United States won a close match thanks in part to poor sportsmanship otherwise unheard of in golf. Justin Leonard sealed, ultimately, the Cup for the United States by sinking a long putt on the 17th hole of his match with José Maria Olazábal, after which players, their wives, and fans rushed the putting green and staged a wild celebration. The only problem is that the celebration depended on, even presumed, Olazábal missing his putt, not yet attempted and rendered virtually impossible following the disruptive celebration. You’d think they had just won a war. Imagine people storming an Olympic basketball court before a player had to make a free throw to tie the championship game with one second remaining and you get something of the point.

The United States, Europe, and much of the world may be facing grave economic and political threats, but let’s not abandon golf to the flag-waving know-nothings without a fight. We should respect what it represents: a generalized disdain for everything but its own self-obsessive excellence and the drive to turn our backs on life, in the name of fun and torment, for a little while. Pace Mark Twain, do not let patriotism spoil the joy of a good walk. It’s done enough already.

Osama and the Culture Warriors

John Buell
Author of Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers!: Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics (NYU Press)

Okay, let me get this straight. A vast swath of land along the Mississippi is now drowning, The Southeast is recovering from a series of tornadoes historic in both scope and intensity. Texas seeks to recover from the worst forest fires in 90 years and the most severe drought in a century. Yet what concerns our leaders and the corporate media the most? Even in death, Osama bin Laden is the focus of attention. Osama apparently contemplated an attack on the US rail system. The response was as immediate as it was predictable. Legislators and national security experts demanded increased levels of surveillance. Some, like New York Senator Schumer, advocated a no ride list analogous to the airlines’ no-fly lists.

As the US government and media discussed steps to strengthen state reach in its war on terror, they were retreating on other fronts. Sierra Club chair Carl Pope pointed out, “Ironically, most of the states afflicted by recent weather extremes voted last November to shrink the federal government and drown it in a bathtub.” And as Pope notes, the state affected by these weather disasters are also the most dogmatic deniers of any connection between our carbon economy and climate change.

Merely a theory, they say. They seem unaware that science does not establish final truths but only theories. When scientists speak of theories, however, they do not mean mere speculation. Theories help guide and integrate countless empirical studies and reams of data. Every theory has some holes and gaps and part of the process of science is filling gaps and refining theories.

Deniers of anthropogenic climate change are in any case holding global climate change theory to standards that many natural scientists now regard as overly restrictive. They insist on a concept of causality that clearly connects each weather event to specific and discrete mechanisms and/or events that always produce the same predictable result. Many fields of science, however, embrace more complex models of change that include the interaction of predisposing conditions, external shocks, and self organizing and amplifying systems. Precise specific predictions are not possible, but scientists can identify conditions far from equilibrium in which a range of extreme events become more likely.

But rather than pursue further the implications of current models of causality in the natural sciences, let’s compare the “evidence” that impels No Ride Lists with the evidence regarding our infrastructure’s ability to withstand likely stresses.

Even if recent extreme weather events are only a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, the broad physical infrastructure of American life is unprepared for even routine stresses In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the US infrastructure as a whole a grade of D.

Our bridges, highways, sewerage and water systems, dams, and levies are in wretched shape. The evidence of their failings is all around us. Yet as the New York Times pointed out, the evidence for al-Qaeda’s threat to the rail system lies in vague speculation about possible plans for which no operational details exist.

Let’s ask another simple question. Suppose al-Qaeda does derail a passenger train in the Northeast corridor or blow up a subway car in downtown Manhattan. A horrible tragedy of course and a despicable act, but the economic cost and citizens lost would be far less than those attributable both directly and indirectly to the (increasingly likely) breakdown of water or sewerage systems in major cities and dams and levies along our great rivers. Reductions in the rail and transit systems imposed over the last generation have undoubtedly already compelled millions more citizens to turn to our dangerous highways for work and leisure activities.

So why is a no ride list urgent while we relentlessly cut funds for infrastructure and turn our backs on even adequate preparation for routine events? Hard facts cannot explain this phenomenon. It is a story of cultural war and identity politics. Historically, diseases associated with despised or distrusted groups have often been deemed great threats. Thus HIV has been the subject of near hysteria, but tobacco kills far more citizens. Despite much public health study over two generations, the Marlboro man carried more resonance with our population than those deemed sexually ‘deviant’ or criminal.

Attributing extreme dangers to groups whose lifestyle or religion differs in significant ways from mainstream values and identity serves for many a deep existential need. Portrayals of the dangers of gays or Muslims, often in language reminiscent of that employed against earlier generations of others (think the equation of Osama and Geronimo) confirms for some the value and worth of their Christian civilization.

Acceptance of the risks of climate change might entail a real challenge for some to deeply held identities. Money spent on infrastructure means ‘big government.’ Regulations regarding carbon use or changes in production and consumption priorities challenge ways of life for which American workers have committed much of their time and psychic energy. The very sacrifices they have made leave them more committed to an ideal of material affluence and control of nature—either by God or man—as final and self-evident truths. Reassurance through demonization of the other—especially with the claim that they hate us for what we are rather than what we do in the world—can become especially luring or tempting today. This is a world of rapid change, population flows, and the constant emergence of new ethnic and lifestyle minorities.

Constitutional scholar and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald has argued that such proposals as the no ride list are an attempt to achieve the unreachable goal of perfect security, elimination of any risk of untimely death. Greenwald is on to something. Death, even untimely death, is a part of the human condition.

Security, however, as James Der Derian, director of the Global Security Program at Brown University’s Watson Institute points out, historically has had two senses: “Coeval with the condition of security as a preferred condition of safety was a different connotation, of security as false or misplaced confidence in one’s position. In Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote that ‘Security is Mortals chiefest Enemie.’” [1]

Fear of death, refusal to accept a world that may always exceed our grasp encourages an impossible quest for total security. That quest in turn, in Der Derian’s words “trigger a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the otherness of death and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness.” [2]

Our obsession with this latter, hubristic sense of security has ugly consequences—especially in today’s rapidly changing world. We seek the false promise of building society on fully shared core religious and philosophical values rather than upon multiple foundations actively engaged with each other. Under the latter ideal each can come to acknowledge gaps and ambiguities in its own case as it advances critique of its opponents. As Der Derian puts it, one not only learns from and accommodates other ways of living but also “to revise one’s own way of living and doing things.” [3] Such a process aids and is aided by an openness to the new rights claims that will inevitably emerge from such a fluid process. The only absolute is opposition to any religious, sexual, gender, or ethnic group to use of the state to impose its worldview and life style on the rest of the community.

The security obsession stunts our ability to engage difference in ways that might foster a more just, peaceful, and inclusive society. It also impedes our own self-understanding and capacity to explore new currents and visions in our own complex and evolving selves. At the very least obsessive quests for a secure set of personal and national ideals may make this a much more dangerous world.

[1] Der Derian, James. "The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," in Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Constantinou, Costas M. and James Der Derian. "Sustaining Global Hope: Sovereignty, Power and the Transformation of Diplomacy," in Sustainable Diplomacies.