Large Professor, mouthpiece of the inimitable hip-hop trio Main Source, likened police brutality and the larger American society that reared it to a friendly game of baseball. In an insightfully scathing and multi-layered approach Extra-P revealed that American identity necessitated both the repression and expression of racial insecurity through a Zizekian sublimation of reality. While Large Professor's main target was the overt violence directed at African-Americans during the tenure of Ed Koch - a reign which would later seem mild in comparison to Rudolph Giuliani's clampdown of New York City - he alluded to America's society of spectacle and obsession with diversion, one so complete that our own identity seems at once total and insecure.
And people watch the news for coverage on the game
Hmm, and got the nerve to complain
They need to get themselves a front row seat
Or sink a baseline for a beat
Cause television just ain't designed for precision y'all
It's just a friendly game of baseball
Baseball is a seemingly harmless diversion from the atomization precipitated by modernity.
Yet its societal function is one of symbol, where the nation and all its myths are on full display.
Sport is our great refuge from politics. We therefore cease to attempt to grasp our own identity and take for granted that which we believe has been settled.
So when overwhelmingly unimportant "golf analyst" Kelly Tighlman called for young players to "lynch Tiger Woods in a back alley," she made an unthinkable mistake, bringing Politics into our safe hyperreality. Our deluded self-image is so complete that her comments are as absurd as a foursome discussing The Souls of Black Folk or likening the Holocaust to our own Manifest Destiny. The shock is brief though, as the victim calls for calm and the golfing world moves on. Yet our society stumbles on, regurgitating myths and displacing the blame for her comments on the offended and not the offenders. Cue Bryant Gumbell, "after this brief intermission, let's return to the game."
http://sports.espn.go.com/golf/news/story?id=3189374
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JMdBR0kLrU
4 comments:
golf sucks
golf sucks
golf sucks
it sucks that much. 3x much.
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