Samir Chopra's Blog, page 91

Police or Wanna-Be Commandos?

You might have noticed your local police force starting to look increasingly militarized, wearing riot-gear like the type Glenn sports in The Walking Dead, and armed with not just weaponry like Rick Grimes‘ but with an attitude as bad as Merle‘s. Don’t worry, it’s part of a nation-wide trend of SWATting local police:

Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organising cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.

He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s.

Many young men in the US with bullying issues resolve them through alcohol binges, picking street-fights, playing video-games with impressive body-counts, or raping women. Yet others, savvy enough to realize that modern policing offers you a real-life video game with real ninety-seven pounders to be kicked around, sign up for a tour of duty of America’s war zones (its cities), where hostiles (their colored residents) roam (walk), skulk (hang out on corners) and hide (stay indoors).

It’s just like that game Urban SWAT Force: you pick up a signal that crackles over your gleaming black radio, you answer snappily, employing those mnemonics so beloved of military commanders calling in artillery strikes, “Echo Romeo Oscar Yankee! Heading East on Sixteenth!”, you gun the engine, feeling that horsepower spring you forward, even as it pins you in your car seat, propelling you down that blacktop toward the ‘target’ cunningly disguised as a home. Then, time for the crouching attack, the battering ram on the door, the rush inside as stun-grenades go off, deafening everyone but you. Then, finally, the moment you were waiting for: as wailing women and children cower and beg, you open fire, emptying magazines into anything, and I mean anything, that moves: curtains, pets, goldfish, they’re all fair game.

Sometimes grannies bite the dust:

In 2006 Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman in Atlanta, mistook the police for robbers and fired a shot from an old pistol. Police shot her five times, killing her. After the shooting they planted marijuana in her home. It later emerged that they had falsified the information used to obtain their no-knock warrant.

It’s a jungle out there. Only the thin blue line protects us.

Ending the NCAA’s Plantation Racket

In Kevin Smith‘s Chasing Amy, tries to talk out of his crush on Amy:

Banky Edwards: Alright, now see this? This is a four-way road, okay? And dead in the center is a crisp, new, hundred dollar bill. Now, at the end of each of these streets are four people, okay? You following?

Holden: Yeah.

Banky Edwards: Good. Over here, we have a male-affectionate, easy to get along with, non-political agenda lesbian. Down here, we have a man-hating, angry as fuck, agenda of rage, bitter dyke. Over here, we got Santa Claus, and up here the Easter Bunny. Which one is going to get to the hundred dollar bill first?

Holden: What is this supposed to prove?

Banky Edwards: No, I’m serious. This is a serious exercise. It’s like an SAT question. Which one is going to get to the hundred dollar bill first? The male-friendly lesbian, the man-hating dyke, Santa Claus, or the Easter bunny?

Holden: The man-hating dyke.

Banky Edwards: Good. Why?

Holden: I don’t know.

Banky Edwards: [shouting] Because the other three are figments of your fucking imagination!

As I read news of the National Labor Relations Board‘s decision that college players have the right to unionize and allow myself a brief celebration of this victory for common sense, I also prepare myself for the inevitable defenses of the NCAA and its racket–college sports–from folks whom, in my kindest moments, I can only describe as deluded. It is for their sake that I have excerpted Banky’s rant above, for it could be easily rewritten with its three mythical creatures replaced by: the principled NCAA executive, the truthful NCAA lawyer and the honest college sport administrator. And standing over it all, the hallucination of the amateur student-athlete, who plays for passion and pride. Not money. No sir, not that filthy stuff, so visible in prices of season tickets, the salaries of coaches, administrators, the values of television rights deals, the spanking new sports facilities, gyms and stadiums.

Read the NLRB’s ruling and read the descriptions of college football players’ training and game routines, and ask yourself whether those descriptions accord with your sense of a college student playing sports on the side while he pursues a degree as his main vocation. Or do they better describe professional athletes who study a bit on the side? A choice sample:

During this time [football season], the players devote 40 to 50 hours per week to football-related activities, including travel to and from their scheduled games.

College sports is a plantation racket, from start to finish. Hold out promises of unimaginable riches to a community desperate for economic upliftment, pay them peanuts, shackle them to draconian codes of conduct enforced by hypocrites, all the while enriching yourself. That’s how it works. The student-athlete, the scholarship, the education in exchange for a few games; they sure do sustain a great deal of fantasy don’t they?

Thank you for tearing down the non-unionized wall, Mr. Ohr. Now, hopefully, later this year, the judges in O’Bannon vs. NCAA will take the necessary next steps.

Schopenhauer on Revealing Our True Feelings

Thus spake Schopenhauer:

If you want to know how you really feel about someone take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you first see it on the doormat.¹

Why does Schopenhauer imagine that these kinds of reactions of ours would be particularly revealing of our ‘true’ feelings towards our acquaintances? One can hazard some educated guesses.

First, Schopenhauer suggests that on hearing from someone unexpectedly, we are caught off-guard, unprepared by social conditioning and convention, unable to fall back on safe, canned responses.  Thus, our first reaction is very likely to be an instinctive one, a ‘true’ indicator of our visceral, deeply rooted feelings. (There is also the small matter of the fact that more often than not, we will be alone when we pick up the mail and thus, unlikely to be putting on a performance for anyone else.) Schopenhauer deliberately does not suggest that our true feelings would be revealed during a chance personal encounter with an old acquaintance; for then our reactions would be affected by his presence, his eyes upon us.  We might then ‘perform’ for him. Rather, we must be made conscious of our acquaintance without feeling we need to ‘perform’ for him and conform to his expectations of how we would respond to his presence, his station in life, his role in ours. (Presumably, Schopenhauer might think we would have a similarly authentic reaction were we to unexpectedly encounter someone’s letter or photograph in a personal collection of ours; there again, we would be alone and able to respond unguardedly and unselfconsciously.)

Second, Schopenhauer suggests that most social encounters are well-defined and circumscribed ones, their parameters of acceptable behavioral responses quite clearly delineated by all manners of social norms, conventions and niceties; in these settings, we are not being ourselves but are rather, playing very particular roles. As he notes elsewhere in his essays:

There is an unconscious appositeness in the use of the word person to designate the human individual, as it is done in all European languages: for persona means an actor’s mask, and it is true that no one reveals himself as he is; we all wear a mask and play a role.

Here Schopenhauer takes refuge in the unnecessary essentialism of ‘himself as he is’. While this is perhaps unsurprising for someone so fond of the otherwise incomprehensible notion of ‘thing-in-itself‘, he could well have rested content with noting that what we consider someone’s personality is merely the sum total of these roles. There is nothing left over once these roles are accounted for. As the first aphorism suggests, Schopenhauer does think there is a ‘genuine core’ left over. But perhaps even our reaction to the unexpected letter might be a kind of role-playing, one performed for the ever-present witness of our selves. Certainly, in the conversations–sometimes silent, sometimes not–we have with ourselves all day long, we constantly acknowledge the presence of this other.

Notes:

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, ‘On Psychology’, R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin, New York, pp. 171.

American Workers to Bosses: You’re Always Right

Rebecca Schuman recently noted the case of an academic job applicant who lost out on a job offer because she dared negotiate:

[A] job candidate identified as “W” recently received an offer for a tenure-track position at Nazareth College… W viewed the original bid as the opening move in a series of negotiations, and thus submitted… [a] counteroffer, after informing the department—with whom she says she had been in friendly contact—that she was about to switch into “negotiation mode”…..However, instead of coming back with a severely tempered counter-counter (“$57k, maternity, and LOL”), or even a “Take it or leave it, bub,” Nazareth allegedly rescinded the entire offer.

So far, so strange. But it gets worse:

[A]s the story spread over the academic Web faster than a case of resurgent measles, it became increasingly clear that not everybody was flabbergasted. According to many outspoken residents of the ivory tower, W’s mildly aggressive email committed so many unforgivable faux pas that she’s lucky she’s not in jail….How dare this “women” think she could attempt to secure a better life for herself and her family? In this market, if a university wants her to wade around in pig crap, her only counteroffer should be: “Should I bring my own snorkel?” Any beginning academic who tries to stand up for herself is lunch for the hordes of traumatized ivory-tower zombies, themselves now irreversibly infected with the obsequious self-devaluation and totalizing cowardice that go by the monikers “collegiality” and “a good fit.”….

[I]n a substantial portion of the academic discussion, she is being eviscerated, all for having the audacity to stick up for herself for the first (and possibly last) time in her career.

Schuman is right, of course. But W‘s case is not just about academics and their craven kowtowing to bosses. Rather, the reaction to W, the anger at her temerity in speaking up for herself, for daring to suggest to those that sought to employ her that she might want to say something about her working conditions, is a symptom of a broader American worker response: the wholesale adoption of the attitude that the Boss is Always Right.

As I’ve noted in my posts on labor unions (here; here;  here; here; here), there is a curious rejection underway–in the strangest of places, workers’ communities–of the notion of that employees and workers should attempt to change their workplace conditions, demand better wages and hours, or just push back in any way at managerial control. The workplace is where good old American enterprise and self-determination is to be denied to the worker; any evidence that the worker seeks to exercise his agency in demand better working conditions can only be interpreted as indications of bad faith on the worker’s part.

The academic workplace is no different: its workers are subjected to the same relentlessly myopic administrative procedures, the same ideological assaults, as other workplaces.   And they have taken on and internalized, rather effortlessly, managerial perspectives and attitudes. Foremost among them: resentment and anger directed at those workers who seek to assert their right to a better life.

Carl Sagan’s Glorious Dawn: The Promise of Cosmos

The YouTube video titled “A Glorious Dawn” starring Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking (their voices run through Auto-Tune), and snippets from Sagan’s epic Cosmos, has now racked up almost nine million views and twenty-seven thousand comments since it was first put up sometime back in 2009. (Mysteriously, in addition to its seventy-seven thousand ‘Likes’ it has also attracted over a thousand thumbs-downs. There’s no pleasing some people.)

To that count of nine million views I have made several dozen contributions. And cheesily enough, on each occasion, I have detected a swelling, a lump in my throat, and sometimes even, most embarrassingly, a slight moistening of the eyes. I am a grown man, supposedly well above such trite sentimentality. What gives?

Like many of those that write those glowing comments on YouTube, I too watched Cosmos as a youngster. I learned a great deal of astronomy and the history of science from it and watched each episode diligently, as it was shown, every Sunday, on the national television network. Cosmos wasn’t perfect and without fault; even as a teenager, I felt Sagan’s supposed docu-opus was flawed. Many of its segments felt tedious and heavy-handed and Sagan was not an ideal story-teller. (Many contemporary critiques of Cosmos made these points, often accusing Sagan of treating Cosmos as a vehicle of self-indulgence.) But I don’t think my current reactions to that clever YouTubed homage to Sagan and science are grounded in anything like a sophisticated cinematic assessment of Cosmos as a science documentary; their manifestations speak of something far more visceral underpinning them.

I react the way I do to “A Glorious Dawn” because when I watch it I am reminded of a kind of naiveté, one that infected a part of life with a very distinct sense of possibility; I am reminded indeed, of an older personality, an older way of looking at the world. You could call this simple nostalgia for childhood; I think you’d be partially right. This nostalgia has many components, of course. Then, science, its methods and its knowledge, seemed sacrosanct; its history the most glorious record of human achievement, rising above its sordid record in other domains. It seemed to document a long struggle against many forms of intellectual and political tyranny. Because I was a student of science then–if only in school–I felt myself tapping into a long and glorious tradition, becoming part of a distinguished stream of humans possessed of epistemic and moral rectitude. And because I felt myself to be have just barely begun my studies, I sensed a long, colorful, adventure–perhaps as dramatic as those that I had seen depicted in Cosmos‘ many episodes–lay ahead of me.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I traveled through Puerto Rico, making the usual stops at beaches and rainforests. On our list of must-see destinations was  the Arecibo Observatory, whose gigantic radio telescope dish I had seen in Cosmos:

As I posed for photographs that beautiful day, even though I was aware I had traveled–in many ways–far away from the viewpoints my earlier self had entertained in its first encounters with Cosmos, I could still feel their tugging at me, still provoking in me an unvarnished sense of wonderment.

 

Hankering for a ‘Comfortable’ Past

In Home: A Short History of an Idea (Penguin: New York, 1986, pp. 213) Witold Rybczynski writes:

If department stores or home-decorating magazines are any indication, most people’s first choice would be to live in rooms that resemble, as much as their budgets permit, those of their grandparents….such nostalgia is absent from other periods of our everyday lives. We do not pine for period cuisine. Our concern for health and nutrition has altered the way that we eat, as well as what we eat; our admiration for the slim physique would be puzzling to the corpulent nineteenth century. We have changed our way of speaking, our manners, and our public and private behavior. We do not feel the need to revive the practice of leaving visiting cards…or of indulging in extended, chaperoned courtship….Unless we are collectors, we do not drive antique cars. We want automobiles that are less expensive to operate, safer, and more comfortable, but we do not imagine that these improvements can be achieved by resurrecting car models from previous periods. We would feel as odd in a Model T as we would in plus fours or a hooped skirt, yet although we would not think of dressing in period clothes, we find nothing strange in dressing our homes in period decor.

Nostalgia for the past is often a sign of dissatisfaction with the present….the modern interior…represents an attempt…to change social habits, and even to alter the underlying cultural meaning of domestic comfort….People turn to the past because they are looking for something they do not find in the present–comfort and well-being.

“Comfort,” of course, is the notion that Rybczynski has devoted Home to developing:

[A]n invention–a cultural artifice. Like all cultural ideas…it has a past, and it cannot be understood without reference to its specific history….domestic comfort involves a range of attributes–convenience, efficiency, leisure, ease, pleasure, domesticity, intimacy, and privacy.

Hankering for the past in our domestic interiors–but not elsewhere in our lives–makes especial sense in light of the importance assigned to those spaces as settings for the emergence of an individual self, for the development of still-contested notions of privacy, family and sexual relations. It is where human beings begin lives and learn language. It beckons thus as a space of return–sometimes by changing furnishings. And if the interiors of domestic spaces filled up as the interior lives of their residents did, then conversely changing those lives could perhaps be best achieved by changing domestic spaces.

Of course, this act of restorative nostalgia, this seeking out our missing comfort in the interiors of the past, as domestic comfort, as furnishing for our private lives, has never been a low-cost endeavor. Those able to experience this form of nostalgia then, are enabled by their stations in life, their class. Comfort remains an economic privilege (as perhaps, does “dissatisfaction with the present”?) Many may want their homes, their private spaces, to resemble, in overt appearance and function, the homes they dimly remember from a romanticized past, but only a very particular subset is able to indulge that want.

The Visible but Ignored Life Around Us

Yesterday’s post was about death, and how it surrounds us, while being invisible. Today’s is about how life surrounds us too, all the while visible, and yet, somehow, for all that, all too easily ignored.

Once, on a hike in the Indian Garhwal with my brother, I headed back downhill to our camp after bad weather cut our onward progress short. My brother, moving along at his usual steady, mile-eating pace, brought up the rear, while I moved on, eager to dump my backpack and brew up a cup of hot, sweet tea. The day had worn on, and as I descended into the valley that was my destination, the sun started to dip low, its rays lighting up the pine forests my trail wound through.

As I walked on, quickening my pace as I sensed rest and relief after a long day’s hiking, I became less aware of my body: I barely felt the blisters on my feet, the sweat collecting under my sweatshirt and jacket, the soreness in my shoulders and neck muscles.  I became progressively more oblivious too, to my environs. I was walking on a narrow path bedecked with pine needles and cones, cut up by icy streams that came rolling down the hillsides around me, and marked every so often by the signature footprints of the forests’ four-footed residents. But I paid little heed. 

And then, finally, thirst and weariness catching up with me, I stopped to take a swig of water from my trusted canteen. As I gulped down the cooling liquid, I became aware of where I was: surrounded by hundreds of pine trees, their branches and dark green canopies gently swayed by a breeze that seemed to be making its way up the slopes from the valley below.

At that moment, I realized too, I was standing amidst hundreds of living things, each individually dwarfing me, each having stood witness, on that wild slope, to thousands of gorgeous evenings like this one. They stood there, breathing in the same air I was, their ‘bodies” engaged in the homeostatic processes similar to mine, maintaining their structural and functional integrity, their delicately poised and balanced relationships with their immediate environment.

I was in the middle of a crowd. A reticent and partially silent one if you discounted the murmurings and rustlings emanating from the tree-tops as the evening breeze moved through them, but no less impressive for that. Suddenly, I felt self-conscious, almost shy, as if I had become aware of a hundred eyes trained on me, curious and questioning. I almost felt the need to be circumspect, to not disturb the gentle calm that pervaded this sylvan setting, this inhabited space that belonged to its long-term residents.

I had let myself forget life came in many forms, shapes and sizes; as I stood among those trees I was reminded how narrow that vision was.

I moved on eventually, but for the rest of my walk back down to camp I didn’t feel alone any more.

The Hidden Death Around Us

Approximately 150 people die every day in New York City; the three most common causes are heart disease, cancer, and influenza/pneumonia. I’ve lived in New York City for almost twenty years now, so a rough calculation tells me that in the time I’ve lived here, more than a million New Yorkers have passed away. I’ve seen precisely one of them: a homeless man caught between a train and a subway platform, crushed to death, still standing, his face oddly peaceful as he seemed to lean over drowsily. I looked away quickly and kept walking.

There is death all around us but we rarely see it. Humans and animals share our cities, our towns, our streets; they die all the time but they die out of sight.

In The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher Lewis Thomas wrote:

Everything in the world dies, but we only know about it as a kind of abstraction. If you stand in a meadow, at the edge of a hillside, and look around carefully, almost everything you can catch sight of is in the process of dying, and most things will be dead long before you are. If it were not for the constant renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the whole place would turn to stone and sand under your feet….

Animals seem to have an instinct for performing death alone, hidden. Even the largest, most conspicuous ones find ways to conceal themselves in time….

It is a natural marvel. All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. All we see of this is the odd stump, the fly struggling on the porch floor of the summer house in October, the fragment on the highway….

I suppose it is just as well. If the earth were otherwise, and all the dying were done in the open, with the dead there to be  looked at, we would never have it out of our minds. We can forget about it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to  be avoided, somehow. But it does make the process of dying seem more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we must ourselves engage….

There are 3 billion of us on the earth, and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within  this lifetime. The vast mortality, involving something over 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy. We can only really know of the deaths in our households, or among our friends. These, detached in our minds from all the rest, we take to be unnatural events, anomalies, outrages.

As the numbers indicate, death is commonplace, mundane, weekday. We know how to keep it discreet, most of the time. It happens in closed rooms, behind curtains; when it is over, sheets are drawn over the dead so they may be hidden away. It is bad manners to die publicly; when death takes place in visible spaces it is the most disruptive event of all, reminding us of a fate whose thoughts we normally consign to the margins.

The world is a vast charnel house; animal and humans have somehow found a way to diminish the discomfort that might be caused by knowledge of this fact, to co-exist and sometimes even flourish with the remains it stores.

A Tale of Two Wendler Waves

In December, on returning from a four-week vacation to India, one marked by considerable dietary indulgence and a non-existent workout routine, I found myself out of shape. As I made my way back to weightlifting, I found my strength and confidence considerably diminished. Over the next few weeks, I struggled to retain some form and to approach my former numbers in the major lifts (the squat and the deadlift looming especially large for me). But there was no getting away from it: I was weakened and needed to build back up.

In mid-February a new lifting cycle began at my gym, Crossfit South Brooklyn. We were given a choice of doing a Wendler 5/3/1 cycle (fully described here) for the squat and deadlift or doing a 2×10 for the former and a 1×5 for the latter. I opted for the Wendler cycle; I’ve done it before and quite enjoy the challenge of its max-rep sets.

But before I began, I had to settle on what my starting training max–ninety percent of the one-rep max–would be. I knew I couldn’t use my older 1-rep max for this calculation. We tested our squat one-rep max shortly before the lifting cycle began, and I had to swallow my ego and admit my best numbers were down by thirty pounds or so. Last year, I had squatted 305, but this year, the best I could manage–early in February–was 275. I hadn’t tested my deadlift one-rep max (a very old one is 325), but decided I would use the same number–275lbs–for it. It wouldn’t matter if it was a little light; I figured I’d just get a little added volume on my rep-outs.

The following were the prescribed weights for a one-rep max of 275 and a training max of 247.5:

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3



Set 1
160lbs x 5
173lbs x 3
185lbs x 5



Set 2
185lbs x 5
197lbs x 3
210lbs x 3



Set 3
210lbs x 5+
222lbs x 3+
235lbs x 1+

Some creative rounding up and down gave me the following table instead:

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3



Set 1
165lbs x 5
175lbs x 3
185lbs x 5



Set 2
185lbs x 5
195lbs x 3
205lbs x 3



Set 3
215lbs x 5
225lbs x3+
235lbs x 1+

My numbers for the first cycle were as follows:

Squat repouts in third set: 215×21, 225×15, 235×12

Deadlift repouts in third set: 215×14, 225×12, 235×12

You will notice my deadlifts begin weaker than my squats and then slowly catch up.

For the second three-week cycle, which we began without going into a deload week, I changed my one-rep max to 285lbs, which led to a training max of 256.5. This gave me the following table:

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3



Set 1
166lbs x 5
179lbs x 3
192lbs x 5



Set 2
192lbs x 5
205lbs x 3
218lbs x 3



Set 3
218lbs x 5+
230lbs x 3+
243lbs x 1+

Again, some creative rounding up and down gave me the following:

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3



Set 1
175lbs x 5
185lbs x 5
195lbs x 5



Set 2
195lbs x 5
205lbs x 3
215lbs x 3



Set 3
225lbs x 5+
235lbs x 3+
245lbs x 1+

My numbers for the first cycle were as follows:

Squat repouts in third set: 225×20, 235×15, 245×14

Deadlift repouts in third set: 225×17, 235×16, 245×15

Again, my deadlift numbers start off weaker and then catch up and go just beyond.

Despite these repouts being the best I have done at these weights, I do not know if my one-rep max is back up to its former levels primarily because I do not know how well these gains at lower weights translate into gains at higher weights. But, I do know that spending as much time as I have under and over the bar has helped me regain a great deal of confidence in squatting and deadlifting. A long repout rapidly becomes a test of form and breathing technique as well; the ones I have performed over the last six weeks have provided ample opportunity to work on these.

Much more work remains to be done on both these lifts; all in good time. I’m in for the long run.

O’Bannon vs. NCAA: A Hotter Ticket Than March Madness

Why doesn’t the NCAA pay its players? Because they are amateurs. Why are they amateurs? Because the NCAA doesn’t pay them.

That, roughly, is the NCAA’s argument for running the gigantic exploitation racket called “college sports.” Become the primary feeder for the nation’s professional leagues, to the extent it is well-nigh impossible to get drafted into the NBA and the NFL without having gone through the NCAA, hold out the promise of a less-than-adequate scholarship for college expenses, tell tall tales about how a near full-time athlete can also pursue excellence in college education, pile on the “student-athlete” rhetoric, and finally, most importantly, construct a fantasy–aided and abetted by gullible fans and greedy administrators–about how the college sports player is the last noble bastion of amateurism in sports, how they play for heart and not wallet. That’s how the NCAA does it; that’s how it rakes in, year after year, tons of greenbacks, laughing all the way to the bank (and at its players).

Amateurism in sports has always been a load of prime-grade horseshit–right from the time of the ancient Olympics, its supposed bastion. When you see the words “sporting amateur” read instead, “bosses that don’t want to pay money.”  Nowhere is this truer than in American college sports, a multi-billion dollar industry that somehow manages to pay its workers a tiny fraction of their market worth. (I hope it is common knowledge that the highest-paid public employee in many states is a college sports coach.)

This morning on my Facebook status, I made two postings pertaining to the NCAA. The first pointed to what might be the most important sports-related lawsuit in a while:

As March Madness kicks off, please take the time to read up on [O'Bannon_v._NCAA]

The second noted Charles P. Pierce‘s commentary on the case:

U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken  in an antitrust lawsuit brought against the association by former UCLA All-American Ed O’Bannon and a number of former college athletes in 2009. At issue is the NCAA’s right to profit forever from the names, images, and likenesses of the people who play the games without compensating the players at all. (The suit was kicked off by O’Bannon’s anger that his likeness had been used in an NCAA-licensed video game.) The NCAA sought to deny O’Bannon and his fellow plaintiffs…standing as a class to challenge the NCAA on antitrust grounds….If the court were to eventually decide in favor of the plaintiffs, it would force the NCAA to fork over billions of dollars in television revenues and licensing fees. It could also force the development of a more equitable system in which the people who do the work get a decent share of the profits. All the profits.

This has always been the weakest part of the NCAA’s case. It could argue that players should not be paid, based on the spurious notion that they are getting a college degree out of the deal in exchange for having a 40-hour-a-week job that requires them to travel all over the country….As the TV revenues soared and marketing opportunities boomed, the deal got all out of whack. It was preposterous to claim, as the NCAA does, that, just because Ed O’Bannon played four years at UCLA, the NCAA somehow can profit off of his likeness for the rest of his life. There simply never has been a compelling moral or ethical argument that the NCAA and the university had an inalienable right to every last nickel they could squeeze out of the work done by their student-athletes….

For the NCAA to survive in its current form, it has to win this lawsuit or get the lawsuit dismissed. There’s no third alternative. The NCAA can’t settle and then go back to the status quo ante.