For now, let us return to the ways in which bodies are orchestrated in public space.  I would argue that the road (and other public mobility systems) now acts as a metonym for the social welfare logics that drove Western [auto-]modernity. This is the order of the neoliberal public. The street, the sidewalk, the railways are no longer viewed as great monuments of modern society—or lauded as egalitarian and transportive networks—but as inhibitors of neoliberal self-actualization(s) of speed, spatial conquest, motorway mastery, and gateways to suburban isolation and retreat. Public spaces such as park benches or bus stops are marked as aesthetic obstacles to the manifest market destiny; nodes of a dystopia created by losing social welfare policy-makers and [potentially] squatted by neoliberalism’s ‘failed’ worker-soldiers.

In this way, the street occupies both an imaginary and political corporeography.[i] Nowhere can the endless possibilities of consumer capitalism be performed and celebrated like in the street—it is a rich canvas of commuter and consumer identities. In the accelerated economies, the public is the space where we make the self and at the same time are besieged by technologies of governance, surveillance, and normalization. Increasingly, these disciplinary technologies are arranged in the image of market capital; orchestrating public life and the performances (local and global) along the impetuses of accumulation. Our freedom is framed, to again borrow from Butler, through the public exhibition of market mastery.

Public space is thus paradoxical. On the road, our German-made metabolic cells and Italian handcrafted leather conspicuously project our politics of consumerism and accumulation. In our plazas, we gather as Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street vigilantes. Our sidewalks are arteries and our bodies the lifeblood of the lonely crowd. We embody an imaginary autarky by imbedding our bodies in the symbolic and physical spaces of capital.

Virilio (1977/2006) once asked: “can asphalt be a political territory?” (p. 30). In Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square, on the grenade-cobbled streets of Baghdad, on the basketball hardtops of West Baltimore, and in bitumen corridors spilling onto East Brevard Street, it most certainly is. Asphalt is always ready to be political: to be chalked by Newt-serving college Republicans, Dora-drawing and Mouse-fetishizing toddlers, or forensic investigators; to be cordoned by event promoters, police battalions, or parade organizers; to be used as a bed, a bum bashing arena, or a pathway to a ‘better’ physcial self.

On asphalt, physical life is medium and modality. We perform and bleed on the streets. We move and stop and move again. We encounter bodies and negotiate those encounters. On these public streets, we embody and identify; but more importantly, we touch and feel and smell and ache.

On the street,

we smell the pain of a harsh winter’s sleeplessness

On the street,

we feel those bodies around us as they are thrust into our senses

For no hand is more important than that of the war- and time-ravaged veteran

For whom the street is a prison

The gaze, a shackle on her hand

Trembling as it extends

To the passengers of privilege

As they stagger out of the tavern

Within arms reach of a warm meal

And a sense of belonging

Here, surrounded by the flesh and bowels of the “kinetic crowd” (Virilio, 2006, p. 55), is where Laclau and Mouffe will find strategic answers to their questions of hegemony. It is here where signification matters. It is here where politics, power, and bodies are arranged in the most consequential and potent ways.

Dramaturgs in/of the Flesh and Geographies of the Public

Why should those of us doing work in critical sport and physical cultural studies care about the relationships between the body, public space, and speed? I believe if we are committed to bring about change through our work then we have no choice but to insert our physical bodies into the spaces and paces of everyday life. I have made this case before (with my colleague Michael Giardina). Our argument has been a simple one: to understand physical cultural and its myriad problematics, we need to understand articulation at the level of embodied experience; we can only do that by maintaining a deep corporeal co-presence within the physical world.

But let me take this argument a bit further. Not only do I think we need to “put ourselves” out there, so to speak, as to justly represent living bodies, but I also believe it is imperative that we bare ourselves through acts of research, advocacy, and activism. My use of the term “bare” here is meant to elicit a double interrelated meaning: referring at once to the most common usage, “to uncover or open to view” and to the idea of something that is “plain, without covering, or unadorned.”

To practice this ‘bare’ form of cultural inquiry, as I see it, means to turn our minds over to our bodies. The construct interpretation out of encounter and passage (in the Debordian sense)—deep, sensual encounters and passages. Perhaps it is time to replace the “circuit of culture” model with a circuit of bare life (what Georgio Agamben calls “la vita nuda”). It is time to take physical cultural studies, and the bodies of its (two dozen or so) practicing scholars, to the streets. I believe this is happening at Maryland in the work of Amber Wiest, Bryan Clift, Ron Mower, Jacob Bustad. I believe it is happening elsewhere such as in the bodily productions of Lyndsay Hayhurst and Michael Atkinson. In these examples and many others, the researcher’s body is being positioned in ways that not only help us better understand physical culture, but that also might interrupt the dromological physics of late capitalism. In this way the physical is troubling and inconvenient, the perlocutionary act (in Butler’s sense of the term) will be complicated if not painful. Muscles might ache. Skin my get burned by the cold wind. Flesh might get bruised by the policeman’s truncheon. The body, by way of its spatialization and suffering, will once again matter. The researcher will be reminded of why it matters. The researcher’s body in and amongst bodies will remind us why bodies matter. Those who read our bodily encounters will know the gravity of our work. Those with whom we sleep, eat, breath, and bleed will no longer look skeptically at their interloping charlatan.

This is the starting point of truly evocative, transformative, physical cultural studies.

-       Joseph Goebbels (1931)

The next last battle for which we[i] are readying will be fought, like many that came before it, on the streets. It’s not likely to be televised, as football progeny Gil Scott-Heron rightly predicted—so there’s no need for us to go looking on FOX News or the BBC to find it. It may or may not involve acts of physical violence—a distinction, which Baudrillard imagines, will be of little consequence.

What will matter, and what we will need to be present for—to help enact and to transcribe—will be a change in tempo; subtle or (hopefully) spectacular interruptions to the public rhythms of everyday life.

We’ve seen it before. On the streets of Montgomery and Birmingham, at the Battle of Blair Mountain, in Detroit, Watts, and Chicago. We see it now in Zuccotti Park, in Tahrir Square, in Tripoli, at the Gaines Street Commons, and on U.S. college campuses from Florida (e.g. FIU) to California (e.g. UC Davis). And although we tend to overcomplicate and over theorize it, these flashpoints in history—by the very nature of being disruptive—remind us of a simple “rhythmanalytic” truth: order is established by the organization of space, time, and bodies.

If we concede that the body is always already placed (in spatial and temporal ways) within and against the dominant architectures and rhythms of power, then we might also surmise that on most days and in most places, the body—by way of banal conductions[ii] of its conduct—is turned against itself as it moves in cadence with the geographies that render it docile; complicit in its own spatio-temporal subordination.

However, this is not, and can never be, our end. The order of things is not fixed. Change (or disorder), in a Hegelian sense, arrives through the synthetics of disestablishment and reorganization.

On the contrary, the dominant system is always about to be turned upon its head. For stasis breeds disquiet. Inertia is the lifeblood of revolution.

As the urbanist philosopher Paul Virilio (2006) once said, “The time has come to face the facts: revolution is a movement, but movement is not a revolution” (p. 43). This quote, of course can be read two ways. The pessimists among us will take this to mean that revolution is merely an extension of the body politic, sped up. The optimists and I, however, might read it slightly different, such that: movement, indeed, is not a revolution; but revolution a movement can make. The distinction here is that moving acts spawn deviation from established patterns and pathways. While all movements are anchored to the politics of history (and a history of politics), the location and trajectory of any given movement is never the same; nor is its course ever set outside of the boundaries of history.

In short, how and why we move are at each bound to, and yet constantly deviating from, existing movement formations.

On the Street

Where, then, will these transformations through movement materialize? As I said before, I don’t think we will find revolution on the television. And despite promises of internet-based liberation and technologies of communicative action, it likely won’t spread through cyberspace.  Of course, given recent social media-orchestrated uprisings in the Middle East and elsewhere, the case can be made that the internet provides the an important medium for creating social change. I would argue, however, that the Internet was merely a (albeit important) technology for mobilizing resistance; but without bodies, on the streets, suffering and making themselves and their bodies vulnerable to the regimes of oppressions they sought to confront, much of this change would have never materialized.

Thus, I believe the street to be a transcendental political stage. The street, and other public spaces where governmentalities intersect upon and through technologies of the embodied self—where the physical body, material and symbolic space unite, and public and private lives are laid bare—is the locus the bleeding business that is to be done. It is where we’ll find the body, imposing (and imposed), suffering (and suffered).

In his various works, Virilio argues that unlike the chaotic ideological contestations native to the battlefield or the proletarian malaise unique to the factory, the street has become modernity’s most choreographed, dramaturgic public space. The perfect balance of structure and speed, the street is transformed into a spectacle of modern governance. It is public in its orientation and in its creation; in its access and in its passage.

The street reconciles many of modernity’s contradictory logics. It is a place of resistance and of conference. Regarding the street and capital relations, Virilio writes (1977/2006): “the revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed” (p. 29).

In Goebbels’ Germany, or in Virilio’s Paris a few decades later (e.g., 1968), or in the contested roadspaces of the late-twentieth century U.S. South (e.g., suffrage marches, Freedom Rides, bus boycotts, immigration, and LGBT Rights protests), roadway movement offers the perfect paradox of freedom (of inhabitancy, of occupation) and control (signified, automated, and practiced regulation). On the one hand, the State surfaces as fundamentally inhibitive convener of street autonomy: “the political control of the highway, aiming precisely at limiting the ‘extraordinary power of assault’ that motorization of the masses creates” (Virilio, 1977/2006). Of course the “motorization’ which Virilio evokes in the first instance refers to auto-mobile vessels. Yet, perhaps more importantly, it simultaneously alludes to the automating processes these machines generate. Whether in a car or on foot, the ‘freedoms’ enlivened by public transportation spaces concurrently bring with them limitations and routinizations; who moves when and where, who moves quickly and who moves slowly. “No more riots, no need for much repression; to empty the streets is enough to promise everyone the highway” (p. 49).

On the other hand, the superstructural apparatus is enabling, providing the asphalt canvas for physical and ideological mobility. The promise of mobility and free movement keeps us (moving). It reminds us that as individuals in a free society, we are limited only by the architectures of geometry and imagination. We act out our lives, indeed our very passages through this world, on the street. And while this mythology of freedom can be made into oppressive currency, it is not theirs alone to orchestrate. This is where Althusser, in all his wisdom, falters. Although it might hurt, we can move our bodies into and out of these rhythms of production, domination, and oppression. This is a point I will return to at the end of Part II of my entry.

After a few runs with Back On My Feet, I found myself on a four-mile run early one morning and asked myself, “What am I doing? Really, why am I doing this?”

I wouldn’t consider myself a runner, I don’t particularly enjoy it, I have never challenged myself to run regularly in the past, and I’m unsure if I want to work toward a marathon in the future. As I ran with the group I saw many non-residential members who love to run. In fact, many are extremely active – diving into mountain biking, ultra-marathon racing, long-distance running, and  other activities. I also saw residential members who have trained for and completed marathons with Back On My Feet. I told myself, “the guy next to me has [struggled throughout his life with drinking and drug use]…If this guy is out here doing this, then I can do this too.”

However, sometimes I am still unsure if this group is for me. I didn’t join for the running, even though the majority of members are runners. I joined because I liked the message the organization presented as well as the accomplishments its members sought to attain, and I thought I could lose a few pounds by participating. On the surface, Back On My Feet appeared to be a positive program for those who need it most. Once I became more involved, however, I developed an entirely different perspective.

Back On My Feet’s mission states that the organization “promotes the self-sufficiency of those experiencing homelessness by engaging them in running as a means to build confidence, strength and self-esteem.”  My original perception was that Back on My Feet was suggesting that “help” travels in a one-way direction from non-residential members to residential members. With experience, though, I found this was far from accurate. Instead, Back on My Feet  builds a true communal support group among its members, residential and non-residential. Amid bodily pain, self-hesitancy toward running, and corresponding doubts about the program itself, my own experiences led me to re-evaluate why I ran with Back On My Feet.

When I first joined, I could not complete a full mile. Over the course of a few months I built up my stamina, endurance, and strength with the encouragement of other members; that kind encouragement was a new experience for me. Specifically, one morning I attempted to complete a four-mile run for the first time. On that day, Reed*, a fellow member (residential) and friend, became my cheerleader and assisted me in completing those four miles. Halfway through the four miles I wanted to give up, and he continually responded for the second two miles, “no, keep going, keep going…” I realized that day that I had been arrogant to believe I was helping him by participating in the program when indeed he was helping me as much, if not more. I’ve never had a cheerleader before: my parents were always supportive but never in the capacity that Reed imparted that day and that others have continually offered.

Reflecting on this experience and others, I reformed my understanding of Back On My Feet. I’d like to detail three of the most meaningful experiences I have had. First, and most personal, the cheerfully positive support I received while running, which may seem trivial, was previously absent from my life and atypical of the support I received from my immediate family. The people in Back On My Feet filled a gap in my life, a gap that has ties to familial bonds. Second, Back on My Feet taught me how to approach tasks and goals by taking one step at a time. That may seem cliched, but despite its unoriginality, it is a very useful metaphor in helping me achieve my own goals in my personal and professional endeavors.  Finally, the group established mutually constructed dependence, engagement, and camaraderie. Even though I do not enjoy running, I realize that not only am I doing something for myself, I am simultaneously doing something positive for others.

Bryan C. Clift is a current doctoral student at the University of Maryland School of Public Health in the Department of Kinesiology. The narratives and portraits about the experiences of Back On My Feet members were compiled using a descriptive ethnographic approach and resulted in a compelling and complex understanding of how Back On My Feet members’ cultural identities shape their experiences. Each representation herein is based on interviews with Back On My Feet members and over 100 hours of participant-observation. In addition to contributing toward academic publications these representations were constructed in part to advocate for Back On My Feet. Bryan can be contacted at bcclift@umd.edu.

The text was specifically chosen because its content was relevant to All Kinesiology personnel at Maryland. However, I quickly became surprised at just how divided the Kinesiology department truly is. The bulk of our discussion revolved around the “science” of running. In a room of Kinesiologists – whatever those are – the specialty foci among those in the room included physiologists, cognitive motor neuroscientists, and physical cultural studies scholars. Predominantly, though, the room was comprised of physiologists and cognitive motor neuroscientists. That the discussion of an “other” culture was reduced to how best “we” might run in the future is relatively unsurprising given the dominance of “scientists” in the room. The social, cultural, philosophical, and historical issues raised within and by the text were numerous, and yet these remained relatively insignificant for those involved.

Only three times were humanist questions brought up – Thank you to those who brought these forth. When these questions for the author arose the room suddenly went quiet. The atmosphere and dialogue around these questions was concerning for three reasons. First, it was almost as if these were “issues” that were not to be discussed – somehow ethical, moral, ideological, and other humanist questions are now taboo? The ambivalence of science, hovering in the air of our discussion, is aptly captured by the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, ““You were so caught up in if you could that you didn’t stop and ask yourself if you should.” Second, I was surprised at just how divided the Kinesiology department truly is. Two separate discussions occurred. Scientists spoke while cultural scholars were silent, and while cultural scholars spoke the scientists were silent. We seem to lack even a common language to communicate, which is both concerning and frustrating.

And finally, and most concerning, was the response to the mere notion that a “primitive” society could have achieved higher levels of running performance than all of the efforts of scientifico-medical complex, of which Kinesiology is enmeshed. At some point in our discussion it was voiced that “we might have gone off the right path” in reference to tribal, rural, and pre-modern societies – specifically the references was to running, posture, and foot-striking form. Predominantly, those in attendance received this as a joke, everyone was laughing. But the laughter wasn’t so much to remind us all that this was absurd; the laughter reminded me that in fact all the supposed “benefits” and capabilities of science are so engrained in those in the room that considering life without such modern frameworks for life are so far out of the norm that they are absurd. For those laughing the issue was not that another way of life might be better, but rather that another way of life was simply impossible to imagine because it would mean opening up one’s mind to the consideration that modernity solves as many problems as it creates. This, for the scientist, is impossible to accept because it would involve questioning one’s work and life.

That such fundamental questions about the nature of society, humanity, and existence are left untroubled is troubling. More troubling, perhaps, is the ever-present unwillingness to discuss such concerns among those in the room a few days ago, in what is supposed to be a communal discussion. Even more troubling was the number of voices that remained silent and did not engage at all.

Experiencing silence. Sitting in the Baltimore terminal the gate-agent announced my flight was boarding. Like most other passengers I scrambled myself together and proceeded to clog the walkway while waiting for the broadcast of my boarding zone, zone six. One group of people, though, did not resemble the rest of the passengers; it was a family of four. One woman and man and I presumed their two daughters huddled close together just to the side and rear of the line of overhasty passengers. The mother and wife cried. The two daughters were sad and excited; they looked as though they had done this before. The husband carried a look of concern, preparation, and determinateness. As the Man walked away and inserted himself into the boarding column of people, a seemingly vapid line to me, I realized this was for him both a trial and node of transformation. The near silence of the moment overran all else.

The woman never lost eyesight of her husband in line, she watched him after their last embrace to the moment he moved behind the bland taupe wall that obscured his body from her view. The father looked back only once. Almost synchronic but for the brief flash of his eyes taking in his family, his head went down and his eyes locked onto the footsteps in front of him yet to come. No smile, no tears, no frown, two kisses, and three or four fingers flicked left and right a few times in the stacatto moment. The man dressed in Camo walking toward a plane in a lonely tunnel filled with people, the small silent gesture as a prelude to war spoke deafeningly. The woman stood for a moment, her head dropped into her hands for instant before she embraced her two daughters and they walked back down the terminal together.

Two silences of family. Witnessing the family described above alerted me to sound. While observing them I realized that I perceived relative silence regardless of the likely sound abound. I became curious as to the sounds the family members might have heard, if silence was involved in their perceptions, and how their auditory perceptions contributed toward the meanings constructed therein. For the family, specifically the woman and man, perhaps this sound was a protective and coping mechanism. The woman remaining with her two daughters likely carried familial responsibility, a job, and a generally patterned life to sustain. The silence was a tonal shift for her; her life moved from one wherein her husband is physically present to one without. The man who took up his military assignment the silence constituted a shift from his family to a life of rank, file, and order. The silence brought him into a world where loss and pain deter militaristic goals; to survive necessarily locked away these human characteristics. How sad for war to bring about self-suppression and oppression. The silence catalyzed the division of their lives and separated, to whatever degree they assigned, one way of life from another. In both instances, silence facilitated survival by separation.

Surely a personal experience for the family whose familial and individual meanings I can only speculate, I attune my interest toward a broader cultural meaning. My perception of silence called to attention the man’s family and uniform. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) no longer allows non-passengers from entering airport terminals; families are not allowed, save those military families. On American soil the servicing person is different, highlighted by that difference, and re-colonized to further instill American nationalism. The silent moment encourages recognition of the soldier off to war and together with a family his sacrifice is supported by public patriotic sentiment: What if this were your family? Once on board numerous passengers offered applause at a flight attendant’s announcement that American military personnel were onboard and requested thanks and honor for their service. The silence in the terminal reverberated via passengers’ applause. Lightly and subtly this logic sings, “be grateful.” Articulated by and through applause preceded by silence American ideals survive.

Two silences of warfare. One of the most recognizable features of warfare is the astonishingly explosive sounds war machines produce. Important in the production and reception of sound is human interpretation, or lived sound. Typically, the loudest sounds occur concomitantly with explosions, gunfire, or bombings. Though no war ground currently occupies American territories, America too lives the sounds of war. Americans live war’s silence. The distance at which American wars occur shields the American populace from the sounds of warfare. Television and media coverage carry clips of sound but always with the option of muting violent sound. Even weaponized sound— Steve Goodman has begun to map acoustic warfare with the collective, Audio Intelligence (AUDiNT) by tracing sonic weaponry in forms of tactic and torture from the American Ghost Army in World War II through today —also positions producers and receivers in respective and relative silence and sound. The silence within spatial and temporal distance functions as a distancing mechanism and conceals American complicity, comfort, and survival simultaneously. Entrenched in warfare, however, quite a different silence takes shape.

Amid violent engagement silence functions as a protective and survival mechanism in which brain responses exclude and select specific information. In order to better respond to life-threatening environments the brain processes only information most important for an organism’s survival. Kathryn Bigelow—the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director—captures silence and war beautifully/horrifically as Jeremy Renner’s character neutralizes a bomb in The Hurt Locker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQv6GJyE8YM). Dependent upon the brain’s ability to induce silence the body becomes positioned as one node in a nation’s survival and as a note separating one ideal from another. Survival of the body, brain, nation, and national ideal are scored into silence.

Two silences of sport. The brief moment of silence before sporting events is a regular, ordinary moment in contemporary American culture. While the sport-war nexus is widely discussed as an ideological mechanism servicing American nationalism the silence of this moment itself, the auditory mode of silence, is rarely noted. Today a tradition, the momentous pause at sporting spectacles hails back to its own spatial and temporal presence warped and wrapped in the veneer of silence. Effectively conjoing nationalism, sport, and war, this silence often passes unnoticed. Later at events, the now commonplace “Support our troops” and “God Bless America” rituals throughout games in addition to The National Anthem recapitulate sporting nationalisms via cheers, claps, and chants. Intended as a moment of recognition of Americanism and American support for troops engaged in global warfare, the silent moment seals nationalist functionalisms by simultaneously making itself present and forgotten. Its absence secures its presence.

Analogous to the soldier in battle, another sporting silence occurs during an athlete’s performance. Much like the soldier’s brain minimizing surrounding information effectively focusing on life-sustainment the athlete’s brain focuses on information important for performance. I’m partial to Kevin Costner’s portrayal of this by uttering, “clear the mechanism,” in For Love of the Game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SuXWrXA8l8. The line between survival and performance is not so clear. Performing for a specific purpose the soldier’s brain maximizes her or his performance for survival while the athlete maximizes his or her performance for a game, which rests on the notion of competition and contextual nationalism; thus, performance metonymically personifies a soldier’s survival. This silence, in the context of popular sporting culture national sentiments, too evolves into a moment of nationalist survival and proliferation facilitated by separation; elite performance upholds two of the most quintessential American ideals, hard work and victory. The soldier and the athlete have far more in common than we would like to believe.

Silent survival. Sounds of silence compose similarities among family, warfare, and sport enlisting and enlisted by American survivalism. Human beings form family, in its multifarious definitions, invitingly and lovingly; in contrast, encountering warfare is not likely welcomed; and sporting practices tend to rest unproblematized and trivialized in American consciousness. Yet, orchestrated by notions of Americanism all share moments of silence binding one another in the separation of one way of life over another. The meanings of these silences share commonalities, which successfully recreate the momentum of past transgressions and intertwine social survivorship and national citizenship. You fight, weep, cringe, fold, and carry on. Which uniform is a matter of position, one into which none of us had a choice to be born. Nearly all are implicated. Can you hear your heart beat? The mechanics of silence blare survival.

I saw the American dream today in the Baltimore airport. Everyone was silent…

Having now been at the University of Maryland for a year I have had the opportunity to teach eight discussion sections for the undergraduate class KNES287 – Sport and American Society. One of the key components of the course is the discussion and understanding of, but also hopefully, the eventual use of C. Wright Mills sociological imagination. Based on this concept being core to the course I have read Mills definitions previously but it was not until this semester that I had the opportunity to really sit down and get into Mills book. It was from this reading that something stood out to me, something I want to discuss here. The passage that I wish to discuss comes from section four of the chapter “The Promise” found in The Sociological imagination regarding what Mills calls the “one style of reflection [which] tends to become a common denominator of cultural life” (Mills, 1959, p. 13). It is indeed Mills contention that the sociological imagination (as defined above – although in a brief excerpt) has come to be this common denominator for western culture, taking over the mantel from Darwinian and Newtonian physical science. But as I taught my way through two semesters I asked myself ‘can I agree with Mills? Is the common denominator of these students, before they enter our class, a critical and dialectic conception of reality, society and culture?’ and sadly I would have to say no. This is not to say that there is some genetic/general dumbing down of our student populace but instead I believe that our society and our educational institutions as a major part of this – both in being shaped by and shaping society – are not rewarding, encouraging or facilitating this sociological imagination as the common denominator.

I argue that several factors have played a role in this lack of ubiquity of the sociological imagination in our student bodies:

1)    An increasingly corporatized and rationalized educational system

2)    An increasing dominance of neo-liberal ideology in the west, especially the USA

3)    Increasing resource scarcity and economic instability

Now I must say that I believe these things to be highly integrated but I will try to tease out, if somewhat arbitrarily, their influences on this trend in student engagement. But this discussion is just that, a partial teasing out. I do not have all the answers to this interrogation and so have several questions that I would like to pose also:

1)    As Mills poses that these common denominators happen as trends which can take time to develop are we still on the up slope of a developing common denominator in the ‘sociological imagination’ or have we seen a reversal in this trend?

2)    Do others experiences in settings different to a research one public institution pose a different situation to the one I am proposing?

Before I proceed in my discussion I want to carefully also add that this discussion is subjective (unavoidably so) and is generated from my own experiences and interactions with students. I do not wish to suggest that this will be the same for all educators but instead wish to offer an understanding I have created out of the experiences I believe I have experienced. Hopefully these will be useful in understanding those who have similar experiences but must always be considered as radically contextual and momentary.

With that reflexive moment shared it is important to move on, so I shall.  I turn to the factors I mentioned above:

Factor 1 – As many authors (Denzin & Giardina, 2006; Giroux, 2010; Williams, 2010; Silk et al, 2010) have noted universities have been experiencing an increasing corporatization over the last 20 years at least. With the increasing budget squeezing from the state and federal level in the US and in line with a general business/science/engineering tone fitting better within the neo-liberal ideologies of the west there has been little space left for critical, qualitative and sociologically imaginative work. The competition from for-profit institutions and the increasing adoption of profit maximizing business models has meant that many of these critical disciplines and departments become seen as ‘fluff’ or non-necessary add-ons to the important revenue generating departments. The critically qualitative departments often generate little profitable funding opportunities for the university disappointing on two fronts – firstly as not bringing money into the university but secondly not offering marketable recognition that the university can use to promote it’s ‘brand’. But also with this focus on profit maximization we can see other effects such as the increased importance of the – the most profit/marketing generating aspects at least– university athletic system and the athlete – student.

Factor 2 – The general prevailing neo-liberal sentiment in this country has been building heavily for many years but can see a spike in recent times in the post 9-11 landscape (Kellner, 2007; Peck & Tickell, 2002). The focus on independent funding and reduction in government intervention in taxation and funding has squeezed many universities into the corporatized and rationalized mode mentioned above (Giroux & Saltman, 2009). Indeed a couple of years ago I had the chance to hear the former president of the University of Rhode Island (URI) as he discussed state funding falling from around 70% of budget to 11% in his tenure at the university. This brings about many factors but one of the major factors for URI was a focus on recruiting out of state students that could generate much of this gap in funding. This has also meant a general saddling of many students with large amounts of debt creating a need for the rational connection of degree to increased earnings. A degree now must be worth the large amounts of money invested, giving a focus to pre-professional degrees and sidelining many critically qualitative focused majors. But this neo-liberal policy and ideology stretches back further into education, stunting the development of this sociological imagination, with the focusing of the k-12 curriculum being heavily on the sciences and a lack of funding and time provided for teachers to engage in other paradigmatic approaches to knowledge development (Grossberg, 2007).

Now I have given a very scant and anecdotal review of some of my thought on these factors as there has been many much more in depth and thorough discussions carried out previously. I have also tried to separate these discussions but as I stated earlier these things are unavoidably integrated and dialectically developing. But what I wanted to mention last is an idea that peaked my thoughts and which I think has had less academic development previously. I will not go into huge detail but just start my thoughts rolling.

Factor 3 – Mills states in passage four of ‘The Promise’ that “The obvious conquest of nature, the overcoming of scarcity, is felt by men of the overdeveloped societies to be virtually complete. And now in these societies, science… is felt to be footloose, aimless and in need of re-appraisal.” (Mills, 1959, p.15). And although this was the times that Mills faced at writing this book, in the US at least – a time of post war boom – these are not the times we currently face. We consistently are seeing a depleting of our resources, especially oil (Howard, 2009), and the resultant ecological disasters and international conflict (Giordano, 2005) we are experiencing as a result of our scouring the globe and exploiting it for every last little drop to fuel our overconsumption. No longer is science footloose, it has a purpose again. This I believe is a major reason recently of the refocusing on the sciences and results driven research, and a lack of interest in critical, qualitative and non profit/resource results driven work and study. Maybe any ground gained by the sociological imagination as the common denominator of thought for our students has started to seep away or maybe the only connections being made between the individual and society as a whole is in how one can become a productive cog in this consumption machine that is western society? As there is an increased need to deal with the worlds resource and environmental issues by large nation states and transnational companies I can only see the need for education that does not service this directly being squeezed out even further.

I think this last factor is one that has been very much developed by the rule of the neo-liberal capitalist ideology in the west and the solutions are being driven from the same point and cannot be fetishized out of its social and cultural contexts (Timura, 2001), however I think this will be a factor that will grow in coming years. As resources deplete and populations grow or maintain, the calls for attention to more immediate needs will cloud the importance of critical and insurgent disciplines. But it is necessary that we do what we can to push back, not only to give the space for more useful and just approaches to dealing with these dire problems (which I believe will and can be generated outside of the common areas of patriarchal science) but also so that injustices based on race, gender, sexuality, age, disability or nationality, which could very well intensify in these times, do not get hidden or ignored as unimportant in these times.

If Mills could see the regression in the solutions to resource scarcity and the results of the dominance of neo-liberal capitalist ideology we see now would he still have hope for a critical sociological imagination as the common denominator? Indeed should we carry on this hope or not?

References:

Denzin, N. & Giardina, M. (2006). Introduction: Qualitative inquiry and the conservative challenge. In N. Denzin & M. Giardina (eds). Qualitative inquiry and the conservative challenge (pp. ix-xxxi). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Giordano, M. F., Giordano, M. A., and Wolf, A. T. (2005). International Resource Conflict and Mitigation. Journal of Peace Research. 42: 47

Giroux, H. A. & Saltman, K. (2009). Obama’s betrayal of public education? Arne Duncan and the corporate model of schooling. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 9, 772-779.

Giroux, H. (2010). Academic unfreedom in America: Rethinking the university as a democratic public sphere. In E. J. Carvalho & D.B. Downing (eds.), Academic freedom in the post-9/11 era (pp. 19- 40). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Grossberg, L. (2007). Cultural studies, the war against kids, and the re-becoming of U.S. modernity. In N.K. Denzin & M.D. Giardina (eds.), Contesting empire, globalizing dissent: Cultural studies after 9/11 (pp. 95-120). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Howard, R. (2009). Peak Oil and Strategic Resource Wars. Futurist, 43(5), 18-21.

Kellner, D. (2007). Globalization, terrorism and democray: 9/11 and its aftermath. In N.K. Denzin & M.D. Giardina (eds.), Contesting empire, globalizing dissent: Cultural studies after 9/11 (pp. 53-77). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. Oxford University Press, NY.

Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing Space. Antipode, 34(3), 380-404.

Silk, M.L., Bush, A., & Andrews, D.L. (2010). Contingent intellectual amateurism, or, the problem with evidence-based research. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 34, 105-128.

Timura, C. T. (2001). “ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT” AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY DISCLOSURE. Anthropological Quarterly, 74(3), 104-113.

Williams, J.J. (2010). Academic bondage. In E. J. Carvalho & D.B. Downing (eds.), Academic freedom in the post-9/11 era (pp. 169-183). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

“To be frank,” you say (and by all means, let’s be frank), “female fans have themselves miserably failed their sisters; they’ve not yet come to support women’s teams as men do their own athletes.”

Wrong, my dear man. Wrong. Let’s pass over the fact that men have never supported male athletes as “men” but as strong, tough, powerful, dominating, physical—all those things that “man/men/male” are supposed to code for. It is assumed that strength, toughness, power, and physicality will be part of the game if the team bears the epithet “men’s.” Not so for their female counterparts, whose strength, toughness, power, and physicality seem to have to be qualified in ways that coverage of male athletes never is.

No sir, let’s think about this statement of women’s failure to support their sisters. Let’s take a step back and think about the social relations of sport. People get involved in sporting events and games not just to connect to the prowess of the teams and the athletes. People get involved in sports to connect with other spectator-ing people. Consider the subject line of the message emailed to all students, faculty, staff at my fine Division I University. The men’s basketball team would be playing a rival team from our conference at 8pm. The women would be playing at 4. “FREE PIZZA FOR FIRST THE 100 FANS TO THE ____ CENTER FOR WOMEN’S GAME.” Students had been camping out for tickets to the men’s game for weeks. Students had been talking about said men’s game for months. On the eve of game day, students learned they could snag an early bird special of free pizza if they turned out for the women too.

How many messages do we need to decode here, Mr. Deford, to recognize the failure you’ve ascribed to female sports fans was more than a tad premature? Shall we begin the game times? Men’s games receive prime time positions while women’s events are pushed to the margins? Men’s games are all-out media and social events while women’s games are a way to get free pizza at 4 in the afternoon? People enjoy sports not just for their athleticism (and beauty) but for the ways in which they create social ties. We can be-with friends and strangers and never run out of things to talk about. We can experience camaraderie and rivalry, euphoria, despair and recovery all in a predetermined number of minutes (or meters!). We can jump and scream and be part of something. But the message that keeps slipping in to discourse on women’s sports is all too close to the one my University athletic department sent: “Hey, we’re worried there won’t be anything for you to be part of unless we roll out the free pizza.”

So don’t write this failure off on us “sisters,” Mr. Deford. Sisterhood is a darn good bit more complex.

This contribution is a cross-posting originally published on Margaret’s blog, Pedagogy of the Privileged: Thoughts on Teaching and Learning: http://margaretaustinsmith.wordpress.com/

Not so fast.

A 2008 multi-phase study out of the University of Memphis revealed that 58% of black children could not swim, they drowned at 3-times the rate of their white peers and that simply being black reduced your rate of participation in the sport by almost 60% (MSNBC, 2008).

Phase I of the study entitled, The Mythology of Swimming: Are Myths Impacting Minority Youth Participation?, was commissioned by USA Swimming and spearheaded by Richard Irwin (2008), a professor from the Department of Health and Sport Science.  One predominating myth influencing participation that was addressed was the idea that, ‘black women don’t want to get their hair wet’, and although Irwin believes they proved the relation between hair and swimming to be negligible, I beg to differ (p.12) While these studies have been lauded as a landmark investigation of minority swimming participation and a wake-up call to recognize swimming proficiency as a major public health concern, I am left unimpressed as I feel they fall short of understanding this crucial cultural phenomenon.

Currently USA Swimming has made many attempts to put a giant band-aid on the entire situation by commissioning a mixed-methods study, developing diversity-focused initiatives and creating public forums for coping with cultural barriers. However, none of these initiatives truly address the complex cultural barriers to swimming participation and have proved ineffective. Quantitative research such as Irwin’s only scratches the surface and doesn’t allow for a wholistic understanding and radical contextualization that makes the lack of minority participation intelligible.  I am choosing to enter this discussion from a black feminist framework which I feel will be most productive in understanding the interplay of constructions of race and gender that are at work in black participation in swimming.  By engaging with a corpus of black feminist literature on hair, as well as cultural identity and  social history, I will expose the shortcoming of the current research and expand on future possibilities for minority swimming participation.

Myth busting

Water, in its elemental form, has functioned as liquid oppression in the lives of black Americans.  From the violent and contested desegregation of public pools during the early twentieth century to the fire hoses in Birmingham, AL on May 3, 1963, black Americans have had a public experience with water that is overwhelmingly negative (Wiltse, 2007; BCRI, 2010).  Furthermore, black women have their own specific experiences, likening water to kryptonite with the power to ruin their hair on contact.  The politics of dominant feminine representations influence black females because there are consequences in the performance of one’s racial identity and, “hairstyles are often the means others use to determine whether we are wearing a right or wrong racial identity”(p. 280). Our identities are always in process but they are rooted in a collective past, and for black Americans and the swimming pool, the past is rooted in a history of struggles over access to civic swimming spaces and the politics of representation.

In Phase I of the studies, Irwin’s team surveyed almost 2,000, non-white 4-17 year olds who participated in physical activity programs at 6 metropolitan area YMCA’s in low-socioeconomic areas (p.13). Their survey asked questions surrounding the areas they felt were indicative of low sport participation: financial means to participate, access to facilities, interest in the sport and issues of personal appearance.  In regards to black girls and their hair, they found that 85% of the minority participants disagreed that their participation had anything to do with getting their hair wet, and although black girls responded at a slightly higher rate that it was an issue, the results were taken to dispel that myth in its entirety.  They even went so far as to dismiss the hair myth as, “institutionalized cultural heresy” (p. 21).  However, in Phase II, 12 focus groups revealed extensive discussion by both the mothers and fathers on how ‘hair issues’ become a barrier to their daughter’s swimming participation.  What was seemingly a non-existent issue in survey form became a richly expressive documentation of cultural experiences and values during Phase II.

The parents acknowledged the cultural norms that governed hairstyles and covered a range of topics such as the challenges of hair care and swimming, the time and money spent on hair, as well as their own legacies of fear that hold them back from participating (Irwin et al., 2010, p. 8). Bell hooks(1996) offers insight on the cultural representations of dominant feminine ideologies which shape the mothers’ black hair performances and locate swimming participation as oppositional because it poses a challenge to maintaining straight hair:

Real good hair is straight hair, hair like White folk’s hair. Yet no one says your hair is beautiful, so nice, because it is like White folks hair. We pretend that the standards we measure our beauty by are our own invention. (p. 91, emphasis added)

In this discussion of hair, bell hooks locates the formation of identity within the context of dominant white ideologies of beauty, which has the power to devalue other identities.  In an attempt to gain value and power, performances of black femininity, such as hair care, are constantly being defined against these dominant societal values.  The value of hair is further evidenced in the normalization of beauty practices expressed by mothers in Irwin’s (2010) study:

I like the pool, I like to be in the water but me and the hair issues, no!  Having to do my hair over and over again, and with the chlorine (laughing). To be truthful, that’s why I don’t swim” (p.8)

Another mother affirmed this concern with hair care by explaining how she navigated her daughters’ situation:

I braid their hair for the whole week. They have swimming on Thursdays. On Fridays, I wash their hair for the whole week, and then I do it (braid hair) every weekend. On Sundays, don’t call me, don’t talk to me. I have two girls that I have to take care of. And I want to do it. You have to have a set of mind of that’s what you want (p. 9).

Surprisingly, even the fathers acknowledge the time and money spent on the upkeep of representations of femininity:

You are talking hours, it takes hours. You are talking about the time in the pool but then after the pool the hours that you have to spend getting hair ready for the next day. And, you are paying $80 or $90 to get it done (p. 9)

Yet another salient issue is a legacy of fear in the black community of swimming, which is brought to light by one mother stating that, “a lot of parents are scared and afraid so they make their kids afraid or they don’t feel comfortable taking their kids to a pool” (p.11).  In Contested Waters, Jeff Wiltse (2007) speaks to how social history can help us to understand where a fear of swimming initiated and leads to the production of cultural values oppositional to swimming participation.  Wiltse documents the history of the swimming pool as a site of racial tension. Starting with the segregated pools in Northern cities of the 1920s, Wiltse uncovers how, “the visual and physical intimacy that accompanied swimming, made municipal pools intensely contested civic spaces” (p. 3).  There are stories of black children being drowned by their white peers and in one instance a young boy was only allowed in the pool if all of the white patrons got out and he was pushed in a raft by a lifeguard who warned him not to touch the water (Elliot, 2007).  Given this legacy of public struggle with the swimming environment, it is not surprising that adults and children only one to two generations removed from those who directly experienced this struggle have internalized and reproduced an aversion to the pool.

Where do we go from here?

USA Swimming’s other attempts to increase, “a vision of success” on the diversity front, is just that- a vision, not a reality (USA, 2010).  Their membership currently consists of 250,000 members and 92.5% of those members identify as white, while only 1.7% identify as black (Irwin et al., 2008, p. 12).  Of that 1.7%, they choose 32 individuals, who meet the exceptionally fast time standards, to participate in an exclusive 3-day swim camp in the Olympic training facility as a way to promote their quest for minority involvement. This so-called opportunity places the participating swimmers in a problematic position. When diversity is used in this manner and solely seen as an expression of an essentialized racial category, the individuals representing the diversity initiative embody both the problem and the solution. It is my thought that this swimming initiative holds little opportunity for change because it does not address the main concern of basic swimming abilities and produces a process of exclusion within an already small community of black swimmers.

At Hampton University, the Director of Aquatics, Jodi Jensen, speaks highly of her mandatory swimming program that teaches water safety and awareness skills to college students, making it a one-of-a-kind program (Block, 2007).  Jensen discusses the challenges she has seen her students face in the water and addresses how many women cope with issues about hair.  While some refuse to get their head wet for fear of ruining a style, she had a few students who wrapped their hair in saran wrap and then put on a swimming cap so that there hair would stay dry. In another instance, a swim coach solicited information about hair care to offer to young black swimmers so that they could better navigate participation (Irwin et al., 2010).

What seems to be a unifying discourse in the discussion of hair is that the only possibility for black female swimmers is to search for new and better ways to cope with their situation.  Women partake in discussions of styling techniques, certain hair tools that will make styling after swimming easier, scheduling considerations that can ease the burden and even wrapping a head in saran wrap for protection. However, we cannot begin to move forward unless we acknowledge how the relationship between dominant (white) cultural values and representations of blackness supports further exploitation and oppression, consequently shaping how we see and experience ourselves as ‘other’ (hooks, 1992, p.2).

In Black Looks, bell hooks(1992) challenges us to, “break with the hegemonic modes of seeing, thinking, and being that block our capacity to see ourselves oppositionally, to imagine, describe and invent ourselves in ways that are liberatory” (p. 2).  A liberatory practice would be mothers getting in the pool to learn to swim with their daughters, exemplifying that safety and fitness should not come second to representations of beauty.  It is the embracing of a new way of seeing ourselves-loving our blacknesss and valuing individual representations of self, a shift in the consciousness of black women and girls, that I believe will make a difference in female swimming participation. While this essay only begins to address one specific area that poses a barrier to minority swimming participation, it is evidence for the necessity to complicate and problematized issues of race and sport, rather than to reduce and simplify as Irwin did in his studies for USA Swimming (2008, 2010).  It is my hope that, for the future of the sport and the safety of generations of children to come, that USA Swimming begins to engage with new ways of understanding minority identities so that they can find productive ways to grow the competitiveness of the sport and the cause of water safety.

References

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. (2009). Archives. Retrieved from http://www.bcri.org/archives/index.html

Block, M. (Host & Producer). (2007, April 13). All things Considered: Why don’t more black children swim? Washington: NPR.

Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103022236

Elliott, D. (Host & Producer). (2007, May 27). All Things Considered: Plunging into public pools’ contentious past. Washington: NPR.

Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=10407533

hooks, b. (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. NY: Routledge.

hooks, b. (1996). Bone black: Memories of girlhood. NY: Henry Holt.

Irwin, C., Irwin, R., Ryan, T., & Drayer, J. (2009). The mythology of swimming: Are myths impacting minority youth participation?. International Journal of Aquatic Research & Education, 3(1), 10-23. Retrieved from SPORTDiscus database.

Irwin, R., Drayer, J., Irwin, C., Ryan, T. & Southall, R. (2008). Constraints impacting minority swimming participation. [Presentation].

Retrieved from USA Swimming. http://swimfoundation.org/Document.Doc?id=20

MSNBC. (2008, May 1). 60% of black children can’t swim. Retrieved from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24411271/

Rooks, N. (2001). Wearing your hair wrong: Hair, drama, and a politics of representation for african american women at play on a

battlefield. In M. Bennet & V.D Dickerson’s (Eds.) Recovering the black female body: Self representations by african american women. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

USA Swimming. (2010, December 1). Diversity select camp. Retreived from

http://www.usaswimming.org/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabId=1824

Wiltse, J. (2007). Contested waters.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

That we act on our “gut feelings” is a common proposition; indeed we seem to often hear of an individual’s actions as emotionally rationalized within the moment, both in sporting contexts and beyond. Thus on one hand, we see this discourse of feelings appear in the rather mundane circumstances of organized sport – for example, NBA player J.J. Redick described his decision to sign a free agency contract as a process in which his “gut feeling changed about seven times” prior to his signing, sports columnists explain that placing the PED-using Mark McGwire in the Baseball Hall of Fame goes against a “gut feeling,” and Maryland men’s basketball coach Gary Williams states that he has a “gut feeling” that the new athletic director for the University will be great to work with. But this same discourse of emotions and a type of embodied “knowing” that serves to legitimate actions – or rationalize them afterward – is frequently apparent in more serious, ‘political’, even life-and-death conditions. Thus the statement by Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, in July 2007, that despite a lack of actual evidence, he had a “gut feeling” that another terrorist attack was imminent, and the threat of death-by-terrorist was “very alive” (ironic, I know).

Yet in both sporting contexts as well as those in other moments of our lives, the discourse of gut feelings often operates to dichotomize the relationship between the emotional and the political. That is, when we invoke our “gut feelings,” we speak of certain personal and contextual truths – as sociologist Dawne Moon asserts, “emotions have come to represent their own special kind of truth.” That this type of truth is framed as originating within the body frequently serves to posit it as natural, in opposition to the contested “truth” of social interactions involving conflict and contestation, or in other words, politics. In her work God, Sex and Politics, Moon explains that this dichotomization has particular implications for the ways in which individuals and groups negotiate differences in identity. Within her focus on the issue of homosexuality within religious discourses, Moon recognizes that as people seek to avoid the conflicts and contradictions inherent within politics, they invoke their emotions – their “gut feelings” – when positioning themselves in relation to homosexuality as a sexual identity. Thus on different sides of this particular debate, Moon sees emotional feelings serving as an “incontestable form of knowledge,” a knowledge that is seemingly ‘apolitical.’ Yet such knowledges serve to legitimize some social positions and identities and delegitimize others, and to naturalize this legitimation/delegitimation – that is, they are caught up in the forces of power relations, in which (following Foucault) knowledges are categorized and heirarchized, paralleling the categorization and heirarchization of numerous subjectivities. This means that despite claims to the contrary, “gut feelings” are indeed political, and are not external to power – as Moon explains, “using languages of emotion this way can further obscure an already obscure fact, that emotions themselves, even “gut feelings,” are products of social interactions.”

Thus I would suggest that within the various spheres that PCS research might engage, we might take care to pay heed to the ways in which naturalized emotions – the “gut feelings” involved in processes of everyday life – are employed discursively, and the material basis and implications of these emotions. It seems to me that as sport, physical activity and physical culture writ large is inarguably an emotional experience (whether playing, coaching, or spectating), there is ample space for analysis that seeks to examine the relationship of and between languages of emotion and relations of power. We might even begin by asking ourselves about our own “gut feelings,” and what implications these might have – indeed, some cultural commentators have already begun this process, sometimes in rather explicit “political” contexts:

So, instead, I will go back to what I know, sports stadiums, to work through the peculiarities of this decadent moment.

Classically, the term decadence refers to luxurious self-indulgence, and, to an extent rarely seen in public buildings, contemporary sports stadiums certainly encourage this sort of behavior.  In the New Yankee Stadium, season tickets for front row seats in the on-field Legend’s Suite cost up to $120,000 each.  Ticket holders receive cushioned seats with teak armrests, gourmet meals in a private club, private concierge and wait service, private parking, a private entrance, private restrooms, private elevators, and a private concourse. In Los Angeles, $150,000 purchases season tickets to sit courtside for Lakers games amongst stars like Jack Nicholson, assorted media moguls, and the odd Internet billionaire.  A relative bargain at $3,700 per game, one ticket holder described the location as “slightly more prestigious than owning your own plane.”

While these tickets are certainly extraordinary, attending games in average seats is not much more affordable as Sport Marketing Report has found that a family of four would spend an average of almost $200 to attend a Major League Baseball game, almost $300 to attend a game from the National Hockey League or National Basketball Association, and more than $400 to attend a National Football League game.  Within a generation, sporting attendance has gone from being accessible for most people to being the exclusive domain of the richest 10% of the country.

The design of stadiums and the price of tickets matter as they are indicative of a much deeper trend in American public life, which is for sale and only affordable to the wealthiest few.  Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, American democracy is for sale and its corporate buyers can remain anonymous.  As corporations can give unlimited sums for political advocacy, patriotic-sounding organizations, such as the American Future Fund or Americans for Job Security, use that money to attack any politician daring to argue that taxes on the wealthy should be higher or that corporations should be subject to more regulations (it’s not like lax oversight allowed banks to almost cause the collapse of the global economy in 2008, or poor safety led to hundreds of millions gallons of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico… sorry, bad examples).  Meanwhile, led by Meg Whitman’s $150 million in California, a host of Republican heirs and former CEOs have sought to purchase governorships and seats in Congress by marching beneath the pseudo-populist banner of the Tea Party.

As American democracy becomes the best that money can buy for those with the ability to purchase it, this degradation of politics is the logical consequence of the neo-liberal policies promulgated by both political parties during the last 30 years.  Republicans and Democrats alike have undermined people’s belief in government with politicians being positioned as tools of special interest rather than as public servants, public employees are vilified as inefficient and uncaring bureaucrats, needed infrastructure spending is derided as wasteful pork, and recipients of public support are called lazy and undeserving.  As Republicans do not believe that government is competent to do anything, they appointed unqualified people to run essential government functions who, when disaster struck, made this belief a self-fulfilling prophecy and further undermined popular trust in the public sector (exhibit #1: Michael Brown at FEMA during Hurricane Katrina).

With government in disrepute, the free market and the private sector are the assumed sole source of efficient and effective solutions.  Failing public education can only be saved by private and charter schools.  Because soldiers shouldn’t be responsible for fixing their own meals or providing security at embassies around the world (as they have done since the American Revolution), the government hires private contractors to do the same jobs at five times the price.  Rather than stimulating economic demand by direct government spending or through transfers to people who will use it, government is supposed to stimulate private sector activity through supply side policies with low tax rates for the wealthy and subsidies for business.  Since the public sector can’t be trusted, public assets are sold at cut-rate prices to private companies and wealthy individuals.

The billions of dollars of public spending on sports stadiums and arenas over the past 20 years are certainly illustrative of this neo-liberal philosophy.  Millionaires and billionaires who own sports teams certainly do not need public subsidies and assets to build their facilities, but governments compete for the right to do so.  Although many of these facilities are nominally public, they are managed privately and exclude most people.  But this orgy of government spending on stadiums is nearing its end as the demands of most teams have been sated (for now), and, in this Great Recession, people are beginning to realize the ineffectiveness of stadiums as a development strategy and the inequities perpetuated within its spaces.

Which brings me to the second meaning of decadence as the internal contradictions of neo-liberalism are now emerging and leading towards its collapse.  The apparent strength of the Tea Party and its cadre of candidates would seem to contradict this assertion, but it actually shows both the depth of popular rage at the status quo and the paucity of solutions the political right has to offer.  While this rage began in the early months of the Obama Administration, the impetus for the Tea Party was as a reaction to the Troubled Asset Relief Program and other perceived government bailouts of big banks and big business.  As people lost their jobs and homes and felt the economic insecurity due to 30 years of neo-liberal policies, they watched as the wealthy and major corporations receive hundreds of billions of public dollars.  Establishment Republicans fell victim to this anger as Tea Party candidates defeated them in party primaries and the Democrats will feel it as well in November’s elections.

However, as satisfying as “throwing the bums out” in November may be to the enraged electorate, Tea Party candidates are offering nothing new in terms of policy. Instead, they parrot the very policies that have caused their insecurity in a mantra of tax cuts, spending cuts, free trade, less regulation, and a strong military as if this program was brought down from Mt. Sinai by Ronald Reagan and written by the hand of George Washington and his 12 apostles in 1776.  This non-critical political fundamentalism is embodied by the true leader of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, and many Republican candidates.  It is enforced by Fox News and the right-wing radio talk show hosts who cast as apostates and “refudiate” anyone who deviates from the party line and seeks effective governance through working with Obama and Democrats.

As right wing media outlets and corporate America fuel and bankroll the Tea Party movement, they paint “big government” as the oppressor and the enemy of freedom. But it is important to ask if, at what point (if any), do people begin to look behind the curtain and recognize the true source of their economic insecurity and discontent? Will the next two years be the time when people realize that big government is not the problem, but the corporations who exploit their labor and consumption?  Will people see that government serves corporate power and will they demand that government start serving the people once again?  If so, an energetic political left will find a willing audience for its message.  If not, government will slide into complete irrelevance within the corporate state.

In this manner, the contemporary sports stadium is the perfect metaphor for our times.  With all apologies to Lincoln, these are facilities of the people, built by the people, but for the corporations and the wealthy.  In these spaces that were once fairly democratic, those with access to and benefiting from corporate power enjoy their decadent pleasures while everyone else watches from the outside or on television.  But, for how much longer?