Paid to Suck

Although some may believe that politics and sports are often but unfairly compared, I think it's a mistake to believe they can be separated, and not just because we have a president who once owned the Texas Rangers. And not also because I fervently believe that the personal is political, something I think the recent midterm takeover illustrated all too well. (Seriously, are there any doubters left on that score? Why?)

No, sports and politics go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Like Lennon and McCartney. Like the Bush Administration and Larry Brown. Which Larry Brown, those who have no interest in the NBA -- or New York, for that matter -- quietly ask?

The Larry Brown who recently coached the storied New York Knicks, the highest-paid team in pro hoops, to their worst-record ever and got fired after one year. During his short stint, he pissed off the team, soiled the NBA, and got bounced out of office, this after being a prince of the industry. His exit tally? Out of 82 games, he won 23 -- and walked away with $42.5 million in contract and salary loot in the process. That includes buyouts and infights; in less than a year's sweat, he pocketed over $25 million. For doing nothing. That is called capitalism.

Meanwhile, in a much whiter House, Donald Rumsfeld similarly was thrown out on his ass, yet his guillotine is more hyperreal than Brown's. For him and us, money is information, characters we recognize as numbers across our screens and pages. His actual, which is to say his real salary, is spread far and wide, in past handshakes with Saddam and present economic gambles, including democracy-building. Which, as the world realized this week with the power shift in Congresss, did not hit the jackpot. But you can't fault him for trying. He was actually handing American taxpayer money away in duffel bags. That's called disaster capitalism.

As Naomi Klein, whose book on this subject is on the way, called it back in 2005, "Disaster, it seems, is the new terra nullius." In terms of the Iraqmire, that means that this war was not a search for WMD, or an attempt to spread democracy, or an attempt to pacify the Middle East, or an attempt to secure what's left of the region's oil reserves. It was all of that and more, disguised behind a free-market Oz that, in the end, couldn't leave its Green Zone without getting its head blown off. The whole thing was a Gold Rush, a real-time revision of the Western classic The Wild Bunch, in which of bunch of graying has-beens can't go gently into that good night without taking two nations of innocents with them.

What are they after? What else? Loot and glory. And some who realize they can't get the glory decide to -- like Richard Perle, like Paul Wolfowitz, like... --- take the loot and run. Just like Bechtel did. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is saying that the smart money is in renewal, whether that's energy or community doesn't really matter. Acclaimed economist Sir Nicholas Stern, whose recent bombshell on global warming's price matrix caused the world to smell coffee, has done the math on global warming. But he could have just as easily been talking about Iraq:

"The bottom line is that the less weight you attach to the future simply because it is the future, the less you will value investments in a stable climate. If you consider that the needs of future generations should be represented in decision-making, the case for strong mitigation is overwhelming."

According to that statement, time itself has an economic component. That is, if the present time has value, the future will as well. If the future has no value to you, then you will undervalue the present. And whether you're talking about empathy or investment, the sum is the same. In other words, it's easy to see that myopic egotists of the Bush administration -- and The Wild Bunch -- have no care for the future generation at all. They are locked within their own games, and they have no truck with those who tell them they can't win, even as they are losing miserably.

And here comes the hyperreal twist: They are not losing. Funded deeply and faithfully (get it?) by sectors that have reaped mad paydays at their hands, they are walking away, like Larry Brown, with nothing but Hummers full of cash for being the worst employees in the building. Sure, Rumsfeld's retirement has already inspired the Center for Constitutional Rights to file war crime charges against him, and they're sure to be followed by more clamoring for the same. But oil and pharma exploded with cash under their reign, and those lubricated spikes were enough to keep most of the gross offenders in ironclad legal tangles for their remaining days. On private islands.

After all, the winds of war are changing -- if only in concept. Oil is back down, and because of it everything from the trade gap to our own personal, political and economic pain has (magically!) narrowed. (Some of us even got a pay raise! Magically!) Our symbolic hearts are on the mend, with promise of future healing. That is the warm glow of hyperreality we feel, shifting architectures and settling back into a more comfortable position. Dialing back that Britney whore, who once was a Madonna. To see if the sex tape has hit the internets yet.

Unless of course, getting back to sports, you're the family of Pat Tillman, whose head was actually blown off in real-time, in Afghanistan, in a war on terror against his own friends. Their son, once spun by the mainstream as a NFL goldenboy-turned-soldier hero, is no longer in the program. And his viral narratives, at the hands of the military who claimed to support him but really ended up killing him, have since scattered, and cannot be pulled back together again. Who would have thoughts than sports could actually be more painful than politics?