The Long, Cold Christmas

My morning commute these days takes me through a shopping center; the train lets me off underneath it. It's been Christmas in the mall since the first day of November. That's no surprise. Christmas has become the crutch our retail economy leans on. Many stores run in the red for eleven months and see Christmas put them in the black for the year. A bad year calls for a big Christmas, and a string of bad years calls for bigger and bigger Christmases. If shoppers don't keep finding more and more money for Christmas presents, the whole economy shrinks. It doesn't sound sustainable, but I don't blame local merchants for wanting to start Christmas early and hoping to extend that sweet jolt of retail steroid. We are out of other ideas.

Part of the shopping center was once a department store, famous in our area and featured in a well-known Christmas movie. People in this city are enormously proud of that movie, and proud that it was shot here. I have been urged, while standing in check out lines, to visit the house where many of the film's family scenes were filmed. We don't have too many other things to be proud of. But the store shown in the movie has not a department store for many years; it closed before I came to this city. Still, the store windows have traditional Christmas window displays, all Dickensian scenery and nodding, grinning mechanized dolls. We will go through the motions of Yuletide joy. But there are no children's toys in the space beyond those windows. Last year the old department store became a casino.

The casino's advertising mixes with the lights and Christmas wreaths and the carols piped onto the sidewalk. Gamblers stand outside, smoking. It's hard to see anyone who looks like a high roller. Most of the gamblers seem lower-middle-class, hard working people come to gamble. They are not on vacation, and this is not a resort. The casino's posters are pathetic come-ons, designed to flatter the gamblers that they are daring and glamorous: "Risk Takers Wanted" and "We Turn Gamblers Into Legends." I never see anyone who looks like a legend, and I find the posters sad. No one should be played for a sucker so plainly and publicly. Nobody's self-deceptions should be used to con them in the public square.

We have been voting whether to allow this casino ever since I arrived in this city. It feels like I have voted against it every two or four years. The casino was always voted down until 2012. The long, sluggish recession finally made it impossible for the rest of the voters to say no. We had to do something, anything, to bring some money back to downtown. We are out of other ideas.

Christmas is a cold season, and it gets longer every year. The only part of Christmas that never starts any earlier is charity. The lights are on commercial trees and the seasonal music is on the radio long before the Salvation Army appears. People ask you to spend early and often. They're slower about asking to give. Christmas charity still starts on the old schedule, reflecting older values. As for the rest, the bleaker things get, the more Christmas we all seem to need: more shiny lights and temporary discounts, more glossy commercials and easy sentiment. The harder it gets for everyone, the more we are prodded to celebrate and to spend. We watch endless fantasies of bleak, Dickensian London, and those not making sufficiently merry are told not to be like Scrooge. Most Americans are in no danger of being like Scrooge; saving too much of our enormous wealth is not really our big problem. We may be in a remake of A Christmas Carol, but we're not playing the lead. Instead it's the Bob Cratchits who are asked to be the founders of their employers' feasts, to spend money they don't have, to work themselves a year older but find themselves not an hour richer, all to leave an annual profit in the boss's stocking. Dickens's Scrooge finally vows to keep Christmas all year round; our Scrooges would probably do the same thing if they dared.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Jonathan Martin Does Not Need Your Nonsense

A few weeks ago, an NFL player named Jonathan Martin, offensive left tackle for the Miami Dolphins, walked off the team and sought counseling for emotional health issues. This has led to the suspension of his teammate, the incongruously-named Richie Incognito, on charges of outlandish workplace harassment; an official NFL investigation into the team, now reaching to behavior by the coaches; and the kind of publicity you just can't buy. Plenty of NFL players, sports pundits, and armchair tough guys have denounced the 6'5", 312-pound Martin as soft and weak and proclaimed that outsiders just can't understand what goes on in an NFL locker room. While I don't accept that locker rooms are sacred spaces that outsiders have no right to criticize, it is true that we don't have a great sense of what is going on inside them. Maybe Miami's locker room is unusually dysfunctional, and maybe it's dysfunctional in ways that every NFL locker rooms is. But in either case, Martin may not be any weaker than the other players. He may simply have more options.

Martin played for Stanford and majored in classical history. He's a 6'5" behemoth who's fluent in Latin. His parents are attorneys who met at Harvard, and he turned down a chance be a fourth-generation Harvard student in order to play for nationally-ranked Stanford. (It's worth noting that Martin is bi-racial and the longest Harvard legacy in his family is on the African-American side, going back to a great-grandfather in the 1920s.)

Those facts may lend themselves to a familiar narrative about the privileged kid who isn't used to doing things the hard way. But playing football for Stanford is not really the easy way. Martin played on a top-ten, nationally ranked team; that team could not have competed that successfully unless the football training was extremely rigorous. Playing football for Harvard, on the other hand, would be much easier. The football part of playing football for Stanford isn't significantly different than playing football for Nebraska, Mississippi, or UCLA. What is different is that Stanford football players (and excuse my pride here) also have an extremely rigorous academic program, comparable to any Ivy League school's. At Stanford, football practice is like football practice at Nebraska and class is like class at Harvard. Which part of that sounds like the easy way?

But Martin's background does give him options that many other NFL players don't have. I don't think Martin is the only player who's felt like he can't take the abuse any more. The difference is that most other players have to take it anyway, even when they can't. Where else are they going to go?

If Jonathan Martin never plays football again, he will certainly not see NFL-style money for many years, and possibly never earn as much over the course of his working life. The NFL is paying him seven figures a year. But the total sacrifice of lifetime income may actually not be that large, and there is a real possibility that over the next thirty years Martin could make as much outside the game as he would if he stays in the NFL. He is one of the players most likely to replace his football income by other means. That money would come slower and be less glamorous. But if he went back to Stanford to finish his classics degree and then went into law or finance, he might make upper-middle-class money or better very quickly, and potentially pull down seven figures a year near the end of his career. Instead of making millions for a few years in his twenties, and then some lesser income, he could make a lesser income and then a huge one. Or he could decide that making a six-figure salary in a workplace where no one calls him a "half nigger," talks about "shit[ting] in his mouth," threatens to gang-rape his sister, or shakes him down for $15,000 is better than making millions while being relentlessly extorted and degraded. Jonathan Martin can afford, in the most literal sense, not to put up with that shit.

The average NFL player, on the other hand, does in fact need to take that shit. A great many NFL players cannot afford to walk away. They do not have the choice between making their NFL salaries and making a dignified living as an affluent professional somewhere else. They have the choice between making millions of dollars, no matter the cost to them personally, and making working-class money. If they left the game, many of them would simply be large men without college degrees. For many, their partial college educations were not a genuine preparation for any other field. For most players, there is no other plan. It's the NFL or nothing.

Nothing is more human than resenting someone who is free to walk away from abuse that you have to accept. It isn't reasonable or fair, but it is very, very human. If you have to take as much as your coaches and teammates dish out without showing that it bothers you, and you've developed whatever coping strategies you need to keep accepting that mistreatment, there's no one you hate more than the guy who doesn't have to take it. You can't afford to hate the people who actually beat up on your body and your mind. You have to tell yourself you don't. So there's lots of resentment waiting to be transferred to the guy who decides he's too good to take the abuse that you have to take. What makes him special? It isn't fair. And actually, it isn't, although it's not the guy who's refusing the mistreatment who's to blame.

And let's be very clear: people defending Incognito's behavior or denigrating Martin's have talked about the hazing and bullying, always in vague generalizations, as necessary "toughening." But when you get down to the specific behaviors involved, it's never about making the younger player tougher. It's about making them compliant and docile to authority, beating them down and forcing them to accept any abuse whatever petty tyrant in the locker room decides to dish out. Being "tough" in this context means being a better victim. No one who demands that you give them $15,000 so they can take a trip to Las Vegas is doing that to build your character. And forking over the money does not make you strong. It makes you a chump. That is what the hazing in Miami's locker room was designed to do: not to make the younger players strong, but to break their will, to make them pushovers, terrified to miss a "voluntary" extra practice, afraid to do anything that would displease a coach.

Most of our public conversation about the NFL lately has been about concussions and brain damage. But we cannot have any serious conversation about player health when the players themselves have been cowed this way. An NFL culture that prizes obedience above anything else, that demands players accept any abuse they receive in silence, can never protect its players' health. The whole system is designed to destroy them.

cross-posted from Dagblog