FOOTBALL, OR, LET'S DIM THIS DOWN SO YOU CAN GET IT
Hi George,
Here's an engaging article that might make you see what is so stupid about the Bush schemes to destroy American competition:
observer.co.uk
Just a touchdown from success
Democrats who despair of getting back into power
can find the answer on their very own doorstep
Will Hutton
Sunday January 12, 2003
The Observer
In these macho times, fairness has a poor image. It's the credo
of the also-rans, who need it to compensate them for being
losers. What matters in 2003 is to be individualistic,
entrepreneurial and go-getting - and to make as much money as
possible. Equality is out; 'diversity', the codeword that
legitimises inequality, is in. The able should get the just rewards
for their talents, and if that means sky-high salaries, profits and
the entrenchment of 'natural' advantage, who can and should
complain?
The retreat of equality and fairness over the last 20 years as key
values around which we should organise ourselves economically
and socially has become a rout. The new mantra, justified by
hack right-wing economists, is that just as nature is a Darwinian
struggle of the survival of the fittest, so we should extend the
principle to economy and society. The natural order of things is
to give free rein to those animal acquisitive spirits that will
benefit us all in the long run. After all, where would be if we tried
to suppress those 'natural' instincts with progressive taxation,
caps on executive salaries, regulations that tried to make the
rules of the game fair and all the rest? That would be - dread
word - socialism. And we know where that leads.
If this bleak philosophy dominates the British national
conversation, it is the ideological inspiration of George Bush's
Republicans, standard-bearers of the rise of a particular brand of
conservatism that has not only polluted American culture, but
which, in my view, has become one of the US's least desirable
exports. Last week, for example, witnessed one of the most
extraordinarily unfair budget proposals made in any Western
industrial country. Half the funds consecrated to a tax-cutting
stimulus were earmarked for the very rich, whose dividends on
their share portfolios would now be free from tax.
The idea is that this will lift the stock market and so stimulate
the economy, but because so many shares are held by funds
saving for pensions that are exempt from income tax on
dividends, it will make littledifference, as Wall Street's indifferent
reaction proved. The truth is that it is a barefaced kickback to
America's millionaires justified by the same appeal to economic
Darwinianism. Of course the already rich should be rewarded
more; that's how the Right thinks you make capitalism work.
The protest from the Left that it is unfair has little popular
resonance; ordinary voters in America, just as in Britain, have
become inured to unfairness. The Democrats can fulminate and
fume, but they can't find a folk language to fight fire with fire. Yet
a powerful example of the argument that every blue-collar worker
in America would understand is staring them in the face - and
which, if reworked, might even cross the Atlantic.
American football, the game where the only thing familiar to
most Britons is the shape of its rugby-like ball, whose helmeted,
20-stone giants line up in seemingly inexplicable rituals called
'plays', is organised in the most successful sports league in the
world. Television audiences are booming; waiting lists for season
tickets run into hundreds of thousands, and the sports pages
devoted to it on American newspapers are the most avidly read.
In a fortnight's time, Superbowl XXXVII, when the season's two
best teams slug it out for the championship, will beat even last
year's records for audiences and ad revenues.
It's not just the game's beauty and athleticism that attracts
crowds - to watch a quarterback drive his team upfield in a
variety of highly-planned plays and being countered by a just as
well-thought-out defence is to watch a game of physical and
highly mobile chess - it's that the results of very few games, and
Superbowl itself, are predictable. We know already that this
year's finalists will be different from last year's. There is no
year-after-year domination by the same few superclubs which
have captured the lion's share of the TV rights and which recruit
all the star players on fabulous salaries. This is a genuine
competition, in which any of the 32 league members can win
and it's that which generates such enormous interest.
Nor is this an accident. The ground rules of American football,
stunningly and surprisingly, are organised to give each club as
equal a chance as possible in order to make the best
competitive spectacle. It's not like the British Premiership,
dominated by Arsenal and Manchester United, or even like
American baseball, dominated by clubs like the rich New York
Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. So while baseball,
whose players, on average, are paid twice as much as American
footballers, faces stagnating crowds bored by the predictability
of the rich clubs always winning, American football, collectivist
and egalitarian in its organisation, booms.
For a start, the National Football League (NFL) shares out the
receipts from the sale of the TV rights with punctilious equality;
each club gets $73 million a year, so that more than four-fifths of
the league's total revenue is shared equally. There are no merit
payments for where a club finishes in the league or its number of
appearances on television to benefit the bigger and more
successful clubs. Nor are clubs allowed to hog the receipts from
their own pay-for-view subscription channels, as in American
baseball, which again helps the bigger clubs. The commitment
to equality is profound. The clubs which fared worse in any
single season have first pick of the star freshmen in the next
season to give them a break. Players' salaries are capped. The
NFL offers to pay for half the price of a new stadium, the aim
being to ensure that every club will have a stadium of equal size
and capacity so that gate receipts - ticket prices are also
regulated - are also as equal as possible. Everything is done to
ensure equality of opportunity so that any fan in any part of the
country has a genuine chance of seeing his or her team win.
The result is the most spectacularly competitive and entertaining
sporting league in the world. Its core value, though, is not
survival of the fittest and rewarding the rich and successful. It is
fairness, guaranteed by a complex regulatory apparatus. f I were
an American Democrat, I would ram this point home: American
football is organised around Democrat principles and succeeds;
baseball is organised around Republican principles and is failing.
This is also an example for our own Football Association; unless
it does more to give every Premier League club a chance by
distributing TV proceeds more equally, British football could
follow American baseball into crisis. And there is the larger
argument. Fairness may not be macho, but without it,
civilisations, like sporting leagues, soon decline, In these macho
times, fairness has a poor image. |
