CSotD: The sparkle of gold, the sound of brass
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Yesterday was a day of action for fast-food workers. It was also the day when the NFL and the players union announced an agreement to settle the lawsuits about concussions.
There's a link, and it's not a pretty one. Actually, there's a small link and a big link, but they're different sides of the same strange issue in our hypocritical culture.
Mike Luckovich illustrates the lesser of the two links: It is indeed good to be king.
Coverage of the concussion settlement was marked by some strong analysis suggesting that the league had basically won by getting to seal the record on what they knew about the incredible damage being done to young men's brains and how long they had known it, in exchange for a paltry payout, given the massive profits being generated by the game.
Nick Anderson makes the same point about the tremendously profitable fast food industry and its fight against raising the minimum wage:
As a former business writer, I would say that the coverage of the minimum wage issue has been less a matter of fawning over the fat cats as being ignorant of How Things Work.
It is incompetent to go down to the local franchise and let the owner moan that he'd have to lay people off if the wage went up, or that paying people a living wage would force him to raise prices beyond what customers would pay.
The major kink is farther up the hose than that: The guy with two Subway shops is already giving up money for Subway napkins and Subway wrappers and, depending on the franchise, may even have to purchase food from franchise sources, plus pay for the privilege of the corporate brand and for the benefit of national advertising.
He still makes a decent living, mind you, but he could pay his workers more if he wasn't forking over so much to the fat cats at the top.
And here's where the major link between the two stories emerges: Where incompetent reporting becomes toxic is when unions become the villains, and those who would like to make a living wage are blamed for being greedy.
That's where opinionmakers step over the line and become stooges and lackeys, and, if you read the comments sections following either of these stories, you'll find that the fat cats have been highly successful in making a large section of the boobousie militantly against giving workers a fair share of the take.
As of a year ago, the average cost of attending a single NFL game for a family of four was $443.93. The average attendance was 77,000 over 16 games, plus the preseason. And we haven't talked about television revenues or additional income from sales of sports gear.
Yet the gifted young men who fill those seats and produce those TV ratings and make those overpriced caps and jerseys so attractive are lazy whiners who make too much money "just for playing a game."
Just as welfare recipients are freeloaders who don't want to work despite how many of them are flipping burgers for minimum wage while taxpayers provide what the Burger King and Ronald McDonald won't.
We are living in a plutocracy, driven by the Golden Rule, as in the old line, "He who has the gold makes the rules."
That's funny, in a gallow's humor way. We laugh because we realize the massive hypocrisy that lies at the center of our rejection of a basic — often the basic — tenet of every major religion in the world.
We ignore the common-to-most-religions strictures about lust, and pretend we don't, which is to say, there's a Playboy tucked under the mattress, but at least it's not on the coffee table.
And we're all horrified by the dance that She Who Shall Not Be Named did on MTV the other night, though not many of us were actually watching then. But we rushed to be horrified once we heard about it.
My mother tells of a retreat she went on decades ago, at which the priest said that, if we had a healthy spiritual view, "My Sin" would be no more enticing a name for a perfume than "My Vomit."
Whatever you think of priests and churches and such, the dude had religious hypocrisy down cold.
Religion in America, however, is not a matter of spiritual discipline. It's just something you put on to build an identity.
A person who puts a bumpersticker extoling Christianity on his car and then complains about welfare recipients is no more a Christian than that fat guy in the Peyton Manning jersey at the mall is quarterback of the Denver Broncos.
We don't just ignore Christ's call to love others, but go through massive moral contortions to reject it.
The King James translation of 1 Corinthians 13 does not leave a lot of wiggle room:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of
prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I
have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity,
I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
That last sentence nails it down: "Charity" is not about giving things to people, and most translators today use the word "love" in its place, though our Valentine's Day interpretation of that word makes it also inadequate. Even "empathy" doesn't go far enough to explain the requirement.
The fact that we don't have a word for what the Lord demands of us is part of that poisonous Puritan ethic that permeates our culture.
I've complained about an approach to American history that sees it as "the virus that spread from Plymouth Rock." This means, for instance, that kids don't learn about the history of the American West until after the Civil War, because 300 years of Spanish/Indian interactions are not part of "our" history.
But it also means that we assume the culture of the Puritans to be "our" culture, and this doesn't just mean that "charity" is when a person who works hard gives something to a person who doesn't deserve it.
It also means that you can hit a child because you love him and need to teach him a lesson, just as, if you love the poor, you let them go without health care, in order to motivate them to stop being worthless.
When I wrote a story about the War of 1812, the opening chapters had a Mohawk trapper stop by a trading post and witness a boy being beaten for "wasting time."
I emailed a Mohawk historian to make sure that the Iroquois were among the Indians credited with not using corporal punishment on children and to ask what the trapper's likely response would be. She explained:
By 1813, we had over two hundred years of contact with Europeans, so they were not an unknown to us, even when we did not agree with them. Some would choose to speak up, others wouldn't. We also have the traditional viewpoint that kids shouldn't be hit indiscriminately, but were also heavily impacted by non-native views by this time, so spanking would have been practiced by Mohawks also.
Ain't civilization great?
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