America, 2007: An Elegy

Driving to work today, I realized that America is doomed.

We are but a walking corpse of a nation. A hollowed out shadow of our former glory. A pale imitation of the Greatest Generation and the generations that came before. Our decline may be reversible… but I’m not sure I see it this morning as I write this.

What triggers such morbid thoughts? Simple. Tim Donaghy.

Or rather, our society’s response to the story about an NBA ref who apparently bet on games he was officiating is what triggers such melancholy.

I like to listen to morning sports talk radio on my commute to work. And as expected, the top story is about Tim Donaghy, about David Stern, and so on and so forth. It’s a big story in the world of sports, of course. When you don’t know whether the contest you’re watching is a fair one, then as a fan, you cease to care — cease to see it as a legitimate sport. This was the point being made over and over by various commentators in the world of sports.

It’s hard to underestimate how big a deal this is to the sports fandom and to the sports world in general. I heard people questioning whether we truly can believe that Tim Donaghy was just one rogue criminal, or whether there were other NBA refs and players or coaches involved in this betting scandal. I heard people saying that basketball as a sport, and NBA as a league, were both finished in the eyes of the sports fan because they could no longer trust the product the NBA puts out. I heard loud gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes and sackcloth and ashes in all of the prognostications of doooooommmm.

Right now, you’re wondering… okay… so sports fans are upset about a cheater ref. Why does this mean that America is finished?

Because we have had at least three other cases that were more or less identical to the Tim Donaghy situation in the recent past.

Oil for Food.

Fake But Accurate.

Out of Control Pork.

In all three cases, we found that those we had trusted to be fair and neutral were anything but. In the Oil-for-Food scandal, it was established that very senior U.N. officials and member government officials had been bought by Saddam Hussein in the years leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the case of CBS, it was established beyond a doubt that faked documents were used to create a story about George W. Bush receiving preferential treatment in the Texas Air National Guard. And in the case of pork spending, we’re finding that instead of administering our tax dollars wisely, Congresscritters of both parties have been treating the national treasury as their own piggy bank, dispensing funds left and right for vanity projects and in shady deals to benefit campaign contributors.

In none of those cases did the American public react as it is now reacting to the Tim Donaghy scandal.

As a society, we question the integrity of the NBA as an institution (which we should), wonder who else in the NBA ranks is compromised (as we should), and wring our hands about what David Stern, the NBA Commissioner, has to do in order to restore faith in the integrity of the game. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about a game here, folks. We’re talking about something grown men do to entertain the rest of us.

Oil For Food implicated the United Nations at the highest levels, and resulted in the suspension of Benon Sevan, the head of the OFF program, and many others. During the investigation, it was shown that various European officials (e.g., Interior Minister of France, Charles Pasqua) had been bribed by the Hussein regime. If the actions of one ref in the NBA is enough to make Americans question the integrity of the entire NBA and the game of professional basketball, the Oil For Food by itself should have ignited an absolute firestorm of suspicion by the American public. After all, our tax dollars are going to fund the U.N. to the tune of $1.26 billion for 2007. Furthermore, there’s quite a bit of information in the OFF scandal to suggest that the reason why we could not get effective action from the U.N. in the years leading up to our “unilateral invasion” of Iraq was because top U.N. officials and people in power in various nations had been bribed. We went to war in part because of the corruption at the U.N. Our men and women died in part because people like Benon Sevan was not on the “up and up” when it came to Oil-For-Food.

How is it that as a society, we are completely oblivious to this enormous scandal? How is it that as a society we continue to express trust in the U.N. as an organization? Where is the equivalent outrage of the American citizen that he feels for the NBA over the Donaghy gambling scandal?

Fake But Accurate, aka, Rathergate, involved one of the most important news organizations and its senior leadership — including Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes — being involved in a massive lapse in journalistic integrity. And that’s the charitable interpretation. Considering that Mary Mapes contacted Joe Lockhart, a senior operative in the Kerry campaign and offered to put her source in touch with the Kerry campaign prior to airing the CBS news piece (a partisan act for which she was criticized by the independent inquiry panel put together by CBS itself), there’s pretty good evidence that this was no honest mistake of zealous journalists but a corruption of our media system by political hacks.

A democracy cannot function properly without information. If our media is entirely hijacked by partisans out to pursue a political agenda, then the news we receive isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. This scandal almost changed the course of history, as the principals intended to. Our daily lives would have been affected by the fraud that CBS perpetrated on the American people.

How is it that as a society, we continue to believe that our media is unbiased in the aftermath of Rathergate? How is it that we as a society did not demand of CBS, of NBC, of ABC, of the Associate Press, of Reuters, of our newspapers that they restore our trust and faith in them through concrete actions? This was more than one rogue referee; it was at the very least three or four people working at the highest levels of our journalistic system who have been shown to be political operatives in disguise. Their actions thow into question the activities of all journalists in the same way that Donaghy’s gambling throws into question the integrity of all NBA referees. How can we trust the product of the media organizations?

Where is our collective outrage?

Federal earmarks (aka, pork spending) are completely out of control. That link shows that as pertains to just highway spending, in 2005 we had 6,371 earmarks in the highway spending bill. As Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ) pointed out in his July 17th, 2007 speech, the practice of earmarking is absolutely rampant:

Take the Labor-HHS Appropriations bill that we will consider this week. Under the new earmark rules adopted earlier this year, a list of earmarks accompanies the conference report. We received that list late last week. It contains 1,300 earmarks. Are we to assume that each of these 1,300 projects have been individually scrubbed to ensure their appropriateness to the legislation?

And as he points out, Congress is now funding indoor rainforests in Iowa ($50,000,000) and teapot museums in North Carolina ($400,000).  Is this what we the American people intended when we voted these men and women into high office, that they use our tax dollars in such a wasteful way?  These earmarks undermine democracy and majority rule, as the federal dollars flow tend to flow to campaign contributors and other interested parties, who then spend money to make sure their benefactor remains in Congress to keep the cash pipeline open.  The entire system of our government is not on the “up and up” as it were, and it is definitely not one rogue bad actor at work here, but nearly every legislator from both parties busily rooting at the trough.

Where is our outrage?  If the American people are going to worry about the integrity of the NBA over the act of Tim Donaghy, when are they going to worry about the integrity of Congress over the act of these earmarking congresscritters?  If we demand that our sports entertainment be on the “up and up”, when are we going to demand that the spending of our hard-earned money also be on the “up and up”?

It is a sad, tragic day.

I learned today that the American public cares more about basketball, more about the fate of the NBA, and more about the actions of one small basketball referee than it does about the world, about the media, and about our own finances.  As long as we remain fixated on the minute, the distracting, the doings of Linsay Lohan and not the doings of Harry Reid, I fear that we are lost already.

-TS