The Cultural Commons and the Great Divide
Billionaires: Un-American Extremists
Some of you watched the results of the Green Bay Packer—Seattle Seahawk Monday night football game wherein the Packers from Wisconsin were robbed by incompetent scabs (strike-breakers) posing as referees–a week ago. That’s what happens when the NFL engages in union busting against their own regulators—just like the Wall St. Bankers, who pose as capitalists but are, in fact, subsidized by the taxpayers in no risk trades, while regulators close their eyes.
The right-wing billionaire owners of NFL football teams, who wear Romney bumper stickers don’t want no stinkin’ unions. Yet, even Gov. Scott Walker, the Billionaire Koch Brother’s boy in Madison deplored the loss, as did the inchoate V.P. candidate and Ayn Randist, Paul Ryan, another Green Bay Packer fan and fan of Billionaires. We can’t have the home team losing just to save a few million when we’re making billions due to the citizen-owned airwaves (TV contracts) and taxpayer-funded muni stadiums. The real referees are back and the sport looks like football again.
As millions have now learned, you need the regulators and the unions to balance the influence of crazed billionaires, who, as Karl Marx, pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, are a parasitic–cannibalistic lot, who will ultimately eat their own, while degrading the environment, war mongering, or while moving their capital offshore to shore up their investments in China or some other foreign country with questionable human rights record like, say, Israel. Another war–with Iran—will be good for my investments in oil, steel, and blood banks.
We, the dual members of the one percent and the 47 percent, understand that we are held in contempt by the Billionaire supporters of the Romney plutocrats: tax breaks for the rich; let the rest eat beans. Even if we differ on our ideas about social values, we can unite behind our passion for Major League Baseball and the National Football League or the NBA. Mess around with professional sports–today’s opiate of the people–and you will have a bunch of guys out on the streets, armed and more dangerous than mere button pushers–members of the social media whirl.
The billionaires cheered on Reagan for busting the air traffic controllers’ union but they met their match when they tried to bust the referees and degrade the NFL’s Monday night football, one of the last bastions of common culture. Even George Will, The New York Times’ apologist for moderate Republicans, deplored the extremist stance of the right-wing cannibals. NFL players themselves have said they would not play for a team owned in part by flame-thrower Rush Limbaugh, who once implied that Philadelphia’s black quarterback (prior to Michael Vick) was a token or the manifestation of affirmative action. Rush played the race card in the wrong venue when he disparaged Philly’s QB.
Sports fans, unlike politicians and their supporters, focus on the data and live in the real world of wins and losses—like folks with and without jobs or enough money in the bank to meet mortgage payments. Football and Baseball are neither products nor games but sport. In today’s fractured world, where the billionaires divide and conquer, sport represents a foundation of the culture—a civil commons–wherein the fans can discuss the ups and downs, according to the record and claims can be matched against the file to prove a point—unlike nebulous allusions to weapons of mass destruction, balanced budgets, and job creating programs. Sport provides a common language for the masses.
Here’s how grand the divide is between the rich and the rest of us. Mitt and Ann Romney entered a competitor in the Olympics “horse dancing” event, aka “equine dressage.” It is so popular even sports writers don’t know what it is. (It’ain’t boxing.) Meanwhile, President Obama invited the MLB’s great Willie Mays to accompany him on his plane to the first inauguration and defended the integrity of NFL sport re: the scabs. And the President marks up his own brackets for the NCAA season-ending college basketball tournament.
We know, according to the record, that Obama has a birth certificate while Romney has a silver spoon. Like the Billionaires, Romney plays games with American manufacturing, closes plants, and ships jobs, along with his silver, overseas to avoid taxes and increase his profits. Obama plays basketball with his staff in the White House gym.
Who would you rather shoot the breeze with over a cup of coffee or a beer? Eh?