Today at TomDispatch, Robert Lipsyte looks at recent media sideshows involving Michael Vick, Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, Bill Belichick, et al., and wonders if there’s trickeration afoot:
After all, the powers-that-be love to promote sports scandals which encourage a hopelessness about the world as well as our ability to change or control it. Sports scandals liberate us from having to stand up, vote, demonstrate, move on. What’s the use when everything – including our games and pastimes – is so obviously fixed, or at least a little bit crooked?
But as Lipsyte notes, there’s one story at the intersection of sports and war “that refuses to die … one that, it seems, could yet give us hope.” Check it out.
Best laugh I had all day! Thanks, boukolos!
That’s why I only watch pro wrestling. At least the fix is honest and you don’t have to worry who is a dirtbag, because everyone is.
Because of the money and gambling, I truly believe that there is more “fixing” going on then we care to know. Especially pro football games where the referees seem to play way too large a role in the last few minutes of every close game. Watch carefully next time, not every game, but a good portion. Dan Enright and Jack Barry would be proud!!
Pro wrestling is not a sport, its avant-garde theatre, and it mimics politics and is a lot more honest too.
KONTROL
This war is all about control
Of oil then, so it seems?
´Tis more than that: but now the whole
Fabric of fancy dreams
Has gotten smeared in all the gunk,
An oil-rag now the flag as dunk
Within a vat–so men have drunk
Of hubris in extremes.
It´s good so many drop the mask
Of falsehood, growing frantic–
“What was the cause,” so one may ask,
“Was it some high romantic
Vision of joy and doing good,
Of apple pie and motherhood?”
Oh no, they have it understood
As rather more pedantic.
“Because I want an endless room
In which to drive–vroom vroom vroom vroom–
And plastic products to consume,
The rest, alas, I have to doom:
Iraqis had a pleasant home
Now trashed as vandals went to Rome–
Thar´s oil in them thar hills! In chrome
I plan to build a pleasure dome.”
(By which is meant a superdome,
A fancy sporting stadium,
Could anything yet be more dumb?)