There is a sports radio talk show host in New York City who has a simple solution for disgruntled fans: if you don't like what your team is doing, he says, stop complaining about it and vote with your wallet. Don't go to your team's games. Don't watch your team on television. Don't read about your team in the sports pages. Ignore it.
That, you might argue, is the "free market" approach to sports enthusiasm, and while many regard this particular talker as a bit of a bully -- if you live in New York, you know who he is -- callers rarely provide the obvious come-back, professional sports are, purely speaking, not part of the free market. Most teams have a monopoly on their piece of geography, meaning that if you forgo the team, you forgo the sport; and in a business where an acute identification with the product is central to its appeal, no Jets fan or Phillies fan or Ravens fan or, shudder, Mets fan (like me) would simply abandon his team the way that one might opt to abandon a diner if it kept on burning your toast. We Met fans may complain, but it is still our team.
I thought of this last week, not simply because the football playoffs reduced the field to two -- the New England Patriots and the New York Giants -- who will now vie in the mother of all fan spectacles, the Super Bowl. But also because Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking at a South Carolina Bar Association event, had much the same point of view as the aforementioned sports host when he offered this advice about our political process: if you do not like the rash of intensely negative campaign commercials on television this year, the ones made possible by the court's 2010 decision in Citizens United, then turn off the television.
Really? Does he mean this? If we find the political process, our political process, to be so degraded as to offend our democratic sensibilities, the only choice in this, our democracy, our only democracy, is that we interrupt our entertainment habits and block our ears, that we separate ourselves from the commanding communications medium of our time, television, and get our news someplace else? I understand his defense of Citizens United; I even agree with some of it. But to maintain that we should love it or leave it is the worst kind of civics lesson that he, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, can provide.
What about the free-market principle of good speech drowning out bad? What about the people's check on the court, a.k.a. the power to amend the Constitution? What about electing a president who will nominate justices who might eventually overturn this judgment? There are plenty of things to do if you don't like our politics or our Supreme Court's decisions, but unplugging your television set and recoiling to the life of a monk should not be one of them. We have to own our democracy or, frankly, we can't claim it to be one.
The First-Amendment comparison to the free market -- that its value is in the way it encourages a competitive exchange of ideas just as there is a competitive market for goods and services -- has long been an attractive one, since markets are by definition statements of will, and if democracy stands for anything, it is the people's will. In a sense, we are always "voting" with our wallets, whether it is the cereal we opt to put on our breakfast table or the charity we choose to bolster with our giving.
The great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was the first to coin this analogy while discussing speech -- a "free trade in ideas" is the expression he actually used -- though, ironically, he was writing in dissent of the Supreme Court's 1918 decision in Abrams v. United States, a case where the majority ruled that that the First Amendment does not protect words that could be construed as incitements to violence (a doctrine that has long since been refined to a standard requiring an incitement to "imminent" lawlessness).
But an analogy can be dangerous if it is taken too far. If Justice Scalia thinks that turning off the television is the correct response to offensive speech because it is the best choice offered by the "marketplace," then he is taking this one too far. Citizens United is this court's most controversial decision for a reason; it is not only about speech, it is about the most important speech we have, the speech that the Founders ranked higher in value than any other, speech central to our political process.
The majority's argument recognized this; that's one of the reasons why it did not feel as though the state could, under the First Amendment, be allowed to regulate it. But if the effect of the decision is to drive us from the political arena, to disgust us from the coarseness of our own politics, to let a handful of monied interests dominate our discourse, then we have used our logic, our piety of principle, to undermine the very reason for our freedom in the first place. I wonder how the majority would defend its decision if its effect were to force so many people to turn the television off, that they stopped participating in the democratic process and maybe even stopped voting?
Absolutism can be a fetish, and when it stands this boldly in the way of our political branches instituting genuine reform on a political issue, it can only be seen as a dangerous fetish. I feel confident that Holmes himself would have understood this. In that same Abrams dissent, he refers to the Constitution as "an experiment, like all life is an experiment." It was a line he borrowed from the great 19th-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, but the Emerson original is even better. "The more experiments you make," the poet continued, "the better."
Todd Brewster is the Director of the National Constitution Center's Peter Jennings Project and the Center for Oral History at West Point.
Follow Todd Brewster on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ConDailyBlog
"Ignacio E. Sanchez...an influential global law firm and a major bundler for the Mitt Romney campaign...Sanchez is also a registered foreign agent representing the interests of the United Arab Emirates and a former president of the Dominican Republic."
We must act now to make sure our politics are not controlled by foreign countries.
Look at facebook. It now accounts for 20% of all internet traffic, and as much as a playing field leveler as it is, the intimate data we create with every click is being marshaled and sold to the highest bidders (corporations), to tease even more dollars out of our wallets and purses, to even further target us for corporate mind-control, to cement themselves permanently in charge of our efforts, our dreams and our futures. Spectator sports, like the one used in Todd's analogy, is in fact just another distraction to mask the stench of reality.
It's the Borg, my friends, and they want you to think that resistance is futile (assuming that you're even able or willing to peel the blinders from your eyes). Well, if that's the message, then my hero is John Luc Picard, and my battle cry is Wake up, Bone up, Gear up, Shake up and Stand up to take back an America that is, like the fairytale says, run of, by and for THE PEOPLE. Don't dither, we only have a few years left.
I had two very good Jesuit Brothers as Professors in college.
They were thoughtful and open.
It was hard to understand how they could remain religious on a college campus, but they were great professors.
1. I'll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one. (Thanks to Bill Moyers for citing that quote on his great new show.)
2. I'll believe that money equals speech when my bank accepts a recitation of the Gettysburg Address as payment for my mortgage.
As a society I beleive we don't want to trample on Americans liberties completely to where the fans of a team (who often number in the hundreds of thousands, each with their own individual idea of how their team should be run) can dictate to the owner of that team what they can and cannot do. Just like the owners simply cannot compel a single fan to attend their team's games or buy the team's merchandise.
So, if Mets ownership decides to field a team that they feel will not win even half their games in any season for the next decade (much as the kc royals or pitts pirates have done) they have a 100% right to do that without a second thought. It's up to each Mets fan to decide how they wish to react to that reality.
How many posts have been posted on this one site alone, only to be held in "this comment won't be posted until it is approved category" and be dropped off the face of the earth. I have even had replies to my posts that were not approved and later scrubbed.
Hmm, does anyone know how that happens?
It's not worth taxing my brain to try to figure how to circumvent all of this corporate control bullsh*t!
Well....I think we need to make sure that as Conservative justices die out...or retire, we get people with brains to replace them. There are two justices that will be retiring very soon...we have to have a Democrat in office and a Democratic House and Senate to back up this president's choices.
We can not take more Conservative decisions on the court.
Get over it, my derriere...