A Locker-Room Rap with Coach Chomsky: The Politics of Sports, Part II

Raider Nation Wants You.

(This post is a sequel to a previous meditation on the gender politics of the Super Bowl and the fine line between homosociality and homosexuality in jock culture. Part I is here.)

I: A Locker-Room Rap with Coach Chomsky

In the documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1993), Chomsky, a scarifying critic of totalitarian tendencies in American society, anatomizes what he sees as the power elite’s strategic use of corporate mass media to further its anti-democratic agenda. Sometimes, he argues, the Powers That Be use the media to mold public opinion, “manufacturing consent” for their self-serving policies; at other times, they deploy the media as weapons of mass distraction—bread and circuses, by any other name. Of course, in Chomsky’s analysis, even entertainment can be an IV drip for ideology. Take sports, for instance.

“Sports [is] another crucial example of the indoctrination system…because it offers people something to pay attention to that’s of no importance, that keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about,” he says. “[I]t’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in sports. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in, they have the most exotic information and understanding about all kind of arcane issues.

“You know, I remember in high school…I suddenly asked myself at one point, why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me; why I am cheering for my team? It doesn’t mean make sense!

“But the point is, it does make sense: it’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism.”

Raiders fans.

II: An American Parable

The time: 1978.

The place: the stucco-clad sprawl south of San Diego—suburban Chula Vista, to be exact, where the streets were wide and the minds were narrow. The Goldwater Republicans on my paper route, irked by the Chula Vista Star News’s toothless nipping at the heels of the real-estate developers who ran the town, derided the paper as “the red Star.”

The setting: A pep rally at my high school, attendance mandatory.

Incredibly, the student body had been required to attend a pep rally. An inveterate sportsphobe, I’d always given football games a wide berth; as a result, I was unprepared—to put it mildly—for the spectacle of pom-pom waving cheerleaders in the throes of flush-faced cheer-gasm. (Imagine Bernini’s “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.” In bobby socks.) The pleated skirts, the saddle shoes, the rictuses of toothpaste-ad ecstasy: the whole thing was bizarrely time-warped, as if the irrepressibly perky teenyboppers in those mental-hygiene movies from the ’50s had beamed into our gym, feminine mystique intact. Even the word “pep” was retro-corny, straight out of Leave It to Beaver. It was if the ’60s had never happened, and the Vietnam war hadn’t just ended, in 1975.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe the ’70s’ fixation on the ’50s—the conflicted mix of reactionary escapism and ironic appropriation evident in pop songs like Don McLean’s “American Pie,” sitcoms like Happy Days, and movies like American Graffiti (set in 1962, yes, but at heart a drive-in myth about ’50s innocence)—was really a collective attempt to imagine ourselves into an alternate timeline where Vietnam and Dealey Plaza, Watts and Manson never happened. Maybe high schools like mine were using retro rituals like pep rallies and the crowning of the prom queen as vectors of transmission for the black-and-white, Father Knows Best values of the ’50s—incantations against the radical change that feminists, gay liberationists, and Brown Power activists were demanding, in the world beyond the chain-link fence that secured the perimeter of our campus (or so we thought, in that innocent age before Columbine). Textbook examples, in other words, of Chomsky’s “indoctrination system.”

Whatever else it was, the pep rally was a celebration of jock culture, that almost self-parodically reactionary subset of the high school pecking order. To sportsphobes like myself, the social role of sports seemed culturally conservative to the core, a perception reinforced by the neolithic gender roles it modeled: the pneumatic cheerleaders, whose routines inevitably climaxed (I use the verb advisedly) in crotch-banging splits; the hulking football players, whose mammoth shoulderpads and skin-tight pants transformed them into V-shaped cartoons of he-men.

III: Tackling Chomsky

All of which adds up to a Hail Mary pass for Chomsky, right? Inarguably, the corporate-controlled spectacle of televised team sports, and the meathead fandom it rode in on, are part of The Indoctrination System—the elite’s way of distracting the working class from the structural injustices that keep the boot of power on “Joe Six-Pack’s” neck, to use a phrase Chomsky drops at one point in his sports rap.

Or are they?

In their rippingly readable Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire, an instant classic of gonzo ethnography, the husband-and-wife team of cultural critics Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew stand Chomsky’s critique of the social role of sports on its head. Penetrating to the silver-and-black heart of Raider Nation, Miller and Mayhew reveal it, through Studs Terkel-style oral histories and first-person storytelling, as mostly (though not entirely) working-class, surprisingly multiracial and multi-ethnic, and more politically diverse than the stereotypical image of the right-wing lumpendude bellowing “USA! Number One!” during the Super Bowl’s fighter-plane flyover would have us believe.

Miller and Mayhew set their analysis against the post-Reagan economic decline and waning political power of the unionized blue-collar workers who have historically made up Raider fandom’s rank and file, a cultural dynamic exacerbated by the fraying of social ties chronicled by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital. Using Benedict Anderson’s seminal study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, the authors theorize Raider Nation as an imagined community—a virtual world, widespread but tightly knit, inhabited by fans who passionately believe they’re part of something bigger than just a collective identification with a mass-marketed icon of rebel cool (whose merchandising-crazed corporate owners are so grabby they’ve even staked their legal claim to the term “Raider Nation,” for fuck’s sake).

“To put it in academic terms, Raider Nation is a polysemic signifier, a symbol that means different things to different people,” write Miller and Mayhew, in Better to Reign. “When fans put on the pirate shield, they imagine that it stands for hypermasculinity, bad girl flair, street toughness, working-class pride, gangster menace, Oakland pride, Los Angeles pride, ethnic identity, rebellion, persistence, a strong community, hegemonic domination, seventies nostalgia, ironic affiliation with the bad guys, old school football, a social Darwinist corporate ethos, a countercultural party scene, a sign of the little guy, the outsider getting one over on the favorite sons, and any number of other things”—a little more, in other words, than the importance of submission to authority and the joys of irrational jingoism.

That said, Miller and Mayhew are far from Marxist naifs, romanticizing the proletariat in the heroic iconography of Soviet agit-prop. Nor are they cultural-studies geeks whose last, best hope for radical politics is X-rated fanfic pairing Darth Maul and Obi-Wan. “We will not argue, as some cultural studies scholars have, that the consumption of popular culture (in this case sports) constitutes an act of serious political agency,” they note, “but on the other hand, it is not simply indoctrination either.”

“Real Women Wear Black,” Mayhew’s closely observed chapter on the fast-growing female subculture within Raider fandom, argues that point. “We are used to seeing women as cheerleaders,” writes Mayhew, “beautiful feminine baubles emphasizing the tough maleness of the football players on the gridiron. Football, among all the other sports, with the possible exception of prizefighting, enshrines masculinity and uses femininity as a foil. In fact, football’s history parallels fears in the United States that society was becoming ‘feminized,’” due to women’s suffrage, which was challenging the established order of power and gender norms. “Football…was the perfect sport to allay such fears. Its brutality and aggressiveness—its sheer physicality—bespeaks a power through might.” This also explains “the rampant homophobia permeating the stands,” says Mayhew, “as men attempt to police the boundaries of acceptable masculinity and keep the game as unambiguous as possible.” Yet, Mayhew argues, more and more women are, er, penetrating football fandom, a sports culture famous for near-toxic levels of testosterone poisoning. Mayhew believes they’re poaching on the traditionally no-girls-allowed turf of football fandom and, in a sense, playing King for a Day, engaging in a sort of cultural drag. Raider fandom “allows women to play at that gender role,” elaborates Miller, “embodying the maleness of the football fan. It’s a kind of cultural gender-bending—wearing the jerseys, cussing at the bad play.”

In an e-mail interview, Mayhew agreed that “there’s a kind of discourse piracy going on in the stands and living rooms amongst women fans, a kind of catharsis [that results from] watching violent action ritualized on the field,” she said. “Many women’s lives are as marked by repressive work culture as men’s. And rather than identifying with the cheerleaders (the women I talked to had a derisive attitude towards the cheerleaders), they get off on the violent plays on the football field. It’s a kind of ritualized catharsis: you can’t beat up your boss or co-workers, but you can watch guys symbolically beating each other up on Sunday afternoons.”

Then, too, she suggests, the straight female gaze is inherently transgressive in within the stridently male context of football fandom, “feminizing” the macho men on the gridiron by transforming them, in the twinkling of an eye, into pecs ‘n’ ass. “There is a certain pleasure women have in being able to look at men tumble around with each other on the football field,” Mayhew concedes. “There is an erotics at play here: they wear tight, revealing outfits that are simultaneously hyper-masculinizing (the wide shoulders, the fierce helmets) and objectifying (the large package between their legs, the revealed butt outlined quite explicitly by the Lycra fabric of the uniforms). This is one of the few arenas that women can see men touching each other and not just in violent ways (which has its own sexual charge). On the field and sidelines, men hug and pat each other on the butts. (I’m reminded of a feminist theorist who wrote about how much she learned from reading erotic gay male fiction by James Baldwin.) There’s definitely a charge to it.”

Tomb Raider. AP Photo/Ben Margot. All rights reserved.

It’s precisely the heteroglossia of the Raiders-as-cultural-text, to use a litcrit term—the myriad and sometimes contending meanings fans take away from their imagined community—that inspired Miller and Mayhew to write Better to Reign. (Well, that and the fact that Miller, a “non-sectarian leftist” who teaches English and Labor Studies at San Diego City College, is also “a lifelong Raiders fan” marooned in the mecca of Chargers fandom, god help him.)

“Perhaps the most interesting aspects of Raider Nation are its contradictory meanings as an imagined community,” they write. “Raider Nation is a place where fans go for community connection that transcends barriers of race, gender, and class, and it is a site of vicious competitive individualism and petty exclusionary tribalism. It is a family and a place to get away from the ties that bind. Raider Nation valorizes discipline and excess. It is an imaginary land of authenticity and a mass-marketed, trademarked commodity. Raider Nation celebrates working-class grit even as it valorizes the dominant values of a market economy that has ravaged the American working class. But most compelling of all, it is an embattled desire for some kind of community in an age when community is in decline.”

Asked for his response to Chomsky’s critique of sports fandom, and football in particular, Miller invokes Stuart Hall’s model of how people consume the ideologies embedded in TV programming. As he and Mayhew note in Better to Reign, Hall, one of the founders of cultural studies, theorizes that “some people swallow the ‘dominant-hegemonic’ message (or party line) whole, others take an ‘oppositional’ position and resist the message, and many more in the middle negotiate a position that accepts some of the ideology while rejecting other aspects of it.” Says Miller, “I see sports fandom through the same sort of lens.

“The Chomsky quote that you gave me strikes me as similar to the way that W.E.B. DuBois condemned jazz and the way that Adorno looked at popular culture; it misses the nuanced intelligence of working people who might like sports yet are completely aware of the contradictions involved. Baseball is a sport that embodies both a kind of Franklinian work ethic while at the same time it embodies a kind of pastoral rebellion against measured time. Same thing with football, which in some sense is a Taylorist factory being managed by the coach, with a clear hierarchy, but in another sense is chaotic and brutal. The Chomskyian analysis doesn’t give viewers of sport enough credit for being able to negotiate that ideological landscape.

“Also, I don’t believe there’s this cause-and-effect relationship, where if people didn’t watch sports, then somehow they’d be off engaging in political activity. The thing that neglects, I think, is the centrality of imaginative play in peoples’ lives, the fact that this is not just mindless diversion. [Chomsky's argument] strikes me as an argument that, if people didn’t have any fun, then we’d have a much better revolutionary working class. I’m much more along the Emma Goldman line: ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.’ There’s a suspicion of play, there, that has a very puritanical aspect to it—a suspicion of play that is, ironically, a kind of suspicion of the unruly working class. I think progressives aren’t completely aware of the logical conclusion of their aversion to crowds. It’s a fundamentally undemocratic position.

“I don’t make any claim whatsoever that watching sports is a revolutionary activity, nor do I think that sports fans are utter dupes. What I think is that this kind of imaginative play is something that embodies contradictory ideologies; is consumed in a multiplicity of different ways by different consumers of sports, not all of which are inherently reactionary.”

Weighing Miller’s words, I think about the ironically Lippmannesque anxiety regarding crowds that shadows Chomsky’s argument. I think about changing fashions in intellectual attitudes toward crowds, from the French sociologist Gustav LeBon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), in which he argues that even a “cultivated individual” devolves into “a barbarian” when he dissolves into a crowd, to today’s rhapsodies about the wisdom of crowds. I think about Miller’s insights into the politics of play—the radicalness of the ludic, we could call it, if we were in an MLA mood—in an overworked America, and about Miller’s invocation of Emma Goldman’s memorable one-liner, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Which doesn’t mean that Chomsky’s critique is baseless, or that Miller and Mayhew don’t have blind spots of their own. One of the most cogent voices in Better to Reign is diehard Bay Area leftist Joe Blum, who unwittingly gives Chomsky his due while questioning Miller and Mayhew’s ideological investment in Raider Nation’s imagined community.

“This kind of fan phenomenon, even if it’s not a sellout, where you get 50,000 hardcore people to show up, some of them staying overnight beforehand, troubles me,” says Blum. “[T]hese people would never show up at a union meeting. It reminds me…of the sixties…I had been a bit of a sports fanatic before politics took over, but what struck me was that there would be these incredible things going on in Vietnam, and we were getting close to having a strike at our plant, and people would come in and the entire conversation would be taken up with which person ran for how many yards for the Raiders or whatever. That’s how the hegemony works in this country, keeping workers talking about what really matters. I was really struck that people could work themselves into such a frenzy and show an intellectual capacity for the analysis of football, but not for their own economic and political situation.

“I think this is part of a larger conversation about the role that sports play…the hegemonic aspects of keeping makes fanatical, sometimes to the point of violence, about something that doesn’t have any real connection to their lives. [...] It feeds a lot of jingoism. And in the Raiders’ case you have this illusion that you are being rebellious when, in fact, you are just fitting in. [...] It’s a yearning for community, I know. [...] I also realize that as soon as the game is over the bills are the same, whether you have a job or not is the same. Nothing in your life of any consequence has changed.”

Yet, reading Miller and Mayhew’s descriptions of Raider Nation’s generosity of spirit toward its own—the pass-the-hat donations to injured buddies without health insurance, the instant camaraderie of fans who press beer and heaping plates of carne asada on the authors at tailgate parties and literally give them the hats off their heads if Miller and Mayhew admire them—I can’t manage to see these people as tools of the hegemony, somehow. Working stiffs who live for the fleeting utopia of tailgate parties and some Duff-beer dream of imagined rebellion, they’re jury-rigging a rattletrap solidarity in a winner-take-all America, where Wall Street bonuses are off the charts but the armies of the evicted and the unemployed and the uninsured are swelling. In a way, the Raider Nation is a death cult for the downsized and the disenfranchised, America’s recessionary answer to the Mexican cult of Santa Muerta. Sure, Muerta’s following is more about narco violence than a moribund economy (although the two are joined at the hip); sure, Raiderfans’ tribal gear is, on the surface, about playing Weekend Road Warrior. But the pillaging pirate and the grinning death’s-head invite alternate readings in an ever more social Darwinist America, where Wall Street loots the public trust and Big Pharma parries healthcare reform at every turn.

I look at the Raider Nation in their snarling Darth Maul makeup and goofy-badass mall-goth drag, all skulls and spikes, and wonder if they’ll ever yoke their tribal identity to some sort of class consciousness, if they’ll ever funnel their headbanging collective joy—the ludic frenzy of the Black Hole —into an organized political pushback that answers Chomsky’s prayers, yet doesn’t sacrifice Emma Goldman’s dream of a revolution we can dance to. Imagined communities may not be well-suited to direct action, but if anyone was born to be the shock troops of a progressive populism, it just might be the multiracial Raider fandom. At the very least, I’d love to watch their ass-kicking craziness rampaging through the boardroom at Goldman Sachs or onto the U.S. senate floor. In instant replay. Just Win, Baby.

((UPDATE: Edited from 5080 words to a more manageable 3211 (!) on February 25.))