Symbols
I was actually in Detroit, watching the game on TV, when I saw the Brawl. It was disgusting, no question. Players punching out fans goes so far beyond the line you can't even see it anymore.
Since then, however, a bunch of pundits have been using this incident as a symbol of the breakdown of American society. If I were five years old, I might think they have a point; since I've been hearing this exact same argument for decades every time anyone does something stupid in public, I'm getting a bit tired of it.
The Pistons and Pacers who were involved in the tussle deserve harsh punishment, but I don't think their actions tell us anything deep about America. We've had lots of public violence through the years, and what happened in Auburn Hills was far from the norm in any case. Pundits who want to be taken seriously should either look at overall trends or stories with national impact.
For the record, I also don't think we learned anything about ourselves from the Scott Peterson trial; there was nothing particularly significant in ABC's cross-promotion of Desperate Housewives and Monday Night Football; I don't think a bunch of hunters shot dead in Wisconsin proves too much about our gun culture; and as to Ashlee Simpson lip-synching on SNL having any meaning--let me quote George Bernard Shaw regarding the to-do over his use of the word "bloody" in Pygmalion: "Triviality can go no further."
Chicago Guy Adds: As is usually the case in these things, the most revealing aspects about "today's society" stem not from the incident but from the aftermath. Leaving aside the handwringing editorials and commentaries (and the contrarians, stuck for content, writing the "no big deal" reaction pieces), the deeper cultural meaning of the "basketbrawl" was best captured in Artest's own bizarre Today Show appearance, where he kept holding up the CD he was plugging, having apparently been advised that "any publicity is good publicity."
posted by LAGuy @ 3:41 PM
4 Comments:
While I agree in part that the Pacer/Piston brawl is not in itself reason to decry the coarsening of our society, that does not mean it hasn't coarsened. Of course if society has been coarsening over your entire life, you will concede that you will have heard about it for about that long. There are about three people in the world who would not agree that society has coarsened. You may be right, but you are in a vanishingly small minority.
People are always saying society has coarsened, whether the evidence is there or not. First, you have to ask yourself what coarsening means. Sixty years ago, you didn't have blacks and whites playing together, and people openly shouted racist slurs. Aren't we less coarse today? Secondly, in fact, there's less violence out there than there was 10 or even 20 years ago, so you can't keep saying things are getting worse and worse. You can read books in the 50s or 30s bemoaning how the new generation is so much worse than the previous--what you need to show this are actual facts (once you agree upon what you mean), not "feelings."
This is a funny game we play in which any evidence of coarsening is immediately attacked as trivial but off-the-wall "progress" examples are fair game. I may have fallen off a turnip truck yesterday but I don't recall it ever being "polite" to use racial slurs. Still, this standard is at least fair in that it agrees with the general definition of "coarsening of society" which is all about usual standards of politeness rather than violence per se. This argument being days old, I can only say that I hope we will disagree in a way that will not further lead to moral decline of this generation or of ourselves.
I don't want to go too far down this road, since it's a separate argument, but being casually racist was perfectly acceptable for quite a while in our society. Watch movies from the 30's and you will be astounded at what you see, for instance. When Jackie Robinson and later other African-Americans first integrated baseball and then other sports (starting in the late 40s and lasting through the 50s--yes, the 50s, that great era before the 60s that so many conservatives wish to harken back to) they had to put up with incredibly nasty racial jeering on a level that is unimaginable today.
Post a Comment
<< Home