Sport is a great builder of character, and it teaches us lessons for life; for example, that there are players and then there are losers. We also learn at a suitably impressionable age that the referee must be respected and obeyed as Absolute Authority (headmaster, policeman, boss, judge, jury, executioner and treasurer):
When contacted by the Guardian, a Fifa spokesman flatly denied the chance of a rematch, refering to Law 5 in the official rules of the game which states that the referee has "full authority to enforce the Laws of the Game in connection with the match to which he has been appointed", and that "the decisions of the referee regarding facts connected with play are final".
Votre avis is literally of no account. In the world's most popular and lucrative sport, as everywhere else, The Money just has to win.
The meritocratic feminist society which allows Keaton's character to rise to her proper place in the corporate workplace has left the traditional woman's work of childcare to defectives. Social progress toward equality has evidently eliminated Mammy as well, while Bubbie belongs to an alternative New York. Baby Boom did not invent but greatly popularised this gimmick of the parade of caricatures presented to the audience positioned in the point of view of the protagonist. Spike Lee's first film She's Gotta Have It made famous use of this with a parade of "dawgs". Below, a later example which developed, in a critical way, the implications of the "series" as form in which a crowd, community, or population is presented.
Usually, however, as in Baby Boom, the gag is reactionary:
The writer/director aiming at pleasing a white middle class audience who thinks of itself as enlightened and cosmopolitan cannot in his own voice pour contempt on people just because they don't speak English. In his own voice, directly, he cannot just find Chinese and Indian speech ridiculous. But The Wire finds a way to deliver that forbidden pleasure to the audience (and to teach a new generation the imperialist, white supremacist codes and topoi) complete with a license. The white anglophone audience's shameful desires which the white writer/director seeks to stimulate are systematically gratified by this programme with the same alibi: the white writer/director and audience are merely innocent witnesses to the truth of black behaviour (violence, criminality, vulgarity, homophobia, corruption, misogyny, and of course above all, racism).
In this scene above, as is typical of the series, the white writer/director and the audience do not seem to be responsible for the idiotic parochialism, contemptuousness and sneering of which the scene is wholly composed. The frustration of Americans (and British) with inferiors who do not speak their language is a familiar comic routine whose ideology has been exposed for some time now, but this favourite old exchange between white author and the white audience specifically addressed appears to be imposed on both by some reality beyond their control. The ridiculous Orientals themselves are responsible for this familiar scene and the recognisable types of ridiculous Orientals they are, pretending not to speak English, inventing themselves as ridiculous Orientals but as a ruse to further the genuinely nefarious global Oriental purposes of their truly fiendishly wicked and ruthless Oriental masters which include the importation of the harem of "white slaves" who arrive by sea draculesquely as corpses in a container, to dramatically announce the landing in Baltimore of the Swarthy Oriental Conspiracy of Villainy that is Simon's vision of "raw unencumbered" (uncivilised) global capital.
As the depiction or revelation of the nature of Oriental childish buffonishness, murderous patriarchal misogyny, and snarling evil is attributed to the Orientals themselves rather than to the white author who provides these visions for a white audience directly addressed as white, the contemptuous enjoyment of the ridiculous comical Oriental servants of the mysterious, sinister Oriental villains is also displaced. Surrogates for the white creator and consumer of this thousandth (and most vacuous and simpleminded) replay of an ancient gag are provided in the racist black cops whose point of view on the ridiculous incomprehensible Orientals is adopted. These Orientals are not ridiculous because David Simon wishes them to be in the assumption his principally anglophone white audience enjoys seeing such figures demeaned and debased, the scene suggests, but because the clownish black cops enjoy demeaning and debasing them. And the black cops appear as ridiculous foul-mouthed xenophobe hicks, the audience is to understand, because David Simon is constrained to tell the truth (morally, professionally and aesthetically obliged to verisimilitude) even in the face of political correctness terrorists.
The black cops act as blinds behind which the writer/director and audience may conceal themselves, but - comical, typed and raced themselves - they are simultaneously offered to the audience as additional objects of the white creatives' and the white audience's contempt and scorn (it is their mugging reaction to the sound of Chinese and Arabic, not the sound of Chinese and Arabic directly, at which the audience is invited to laugh or to believe it is laughing) even while the effects of their contemptible and unenlightened minstrel-act conduct toward the incomprehensible and risible Orientals are enjoyed with impunity. The black cops take responsibility for the old racist joke the white writer director is telling his anglophone white audience and which they may desire and enjoy. But the black cops are not only the ideological factotums for the writer/director and audience's disavowed supremacist pleasure, staring and cussing in David Simon-and-fans' other-loathing, other-ridiculing stead; their taking on this role gives the white audience the additional thrill of a sense of superiority to the black proxies of their contempt, (see who are the real racists!* still racists, incorrigibly backward, not caught up with the advanced tolerant white folks) and the yet further delight of unchallenged mastery, of seeing the black cops used with such authorial entitlement as representations and figures of Simon's own (and his targeted audience's own) 'dark side' and unenlightened barbarism even while these black characters are deployed as spectral slaves carrying out the sadistic wishes of audience and creator.
The form is a kind of narrative false flag operation. Again and again, black cops and black criminals - about whom he is obliged as an artist for HBO to be brutally truthful and pull no punches however it hurts him -are the disguise the white writer director adopts to gratify his own and his audience's fantasies of humiliating, torturing, maiming, terrorising and murdering black people, while the genuine agency behind this spectacle - creators and consumers - comfortably adopt the pose of bystanders and concerned witnesses who are present out of a sense of duty. The pleasure of being able to blame the black cops for the imbecile Orientalism of the scene rather than having to be grateful to them for their carrying out of the writer/director and audience's abusive impulses is the most refined enjoyment of cultural and ideological white supremacy. The writer/director's infantile cliché racism, which can produce nothing more clever than the rehashing of a decades old gag scene the content of which is confined to "discovering" the supposedly hilarious sound of Asian and African languages and the modern "dialect" minstrelism "English muthafucka!" (as elsewhere "be civilised muthafucka!" and "mind yo language muthafucka!"), is displaced onto black surrogates whom the audience is invited to scorn even while enjoying the spectacle of their racist abuse which confirms the abjection of others.
As throughout the series, the feel of the scene is less of a television drama than a videogame simulation. The actors seem less to be playing characters who might say these lines or behave this way than avatars through whom the game player Simon and the imaginary game player proxy for the audience, are saying and doing, re-creating and repeating familiar scenes and stock moments.
In their apparently side-splittingly "ironic" display of scorn for those who cannot speak a civilised language, the black cop avatars are made to perform for the audience another familiar, favorite cliché: black men's absurd attempts to behave properly in roles more appropriate for white men - to wield authority and embody mature adulthood. Filling these roles with dignity and competence is so beyond the black cops' capacities, they can produce only a risible inarticulate parody even of the racism of their character-ancestor figures and types. "Kunta Kinte yabba dabba dabba do", spoken hesitantly (clearly Wendell Pierce did not like this scene), is a pitiable imitation of the creative verbality of a long line of racist cops and other characters of that class in cinema and television. It is noticeably a Buffy-style snip of dialogue, a television character's mechanical quotation of other television shows he is presumed to have seen (though he has probably not seen earlier episodes of The Wire) passing for "realistic" human speech. There is no convincing illusion that "Bunk" is a "character" in the standard mimetic sense who might say such a thing to another character, a Swahili-speaking African merchant seaman (the celebrated verisimilitude of the show is left behind often for these formula comic intermezzi); rather "Bunk" appears barely disguised as a game avatar through whom Simon delivers this line indirectly to the audience, confidentially, (the sailor to whom the remark is directed does not understand, the audience does) as d'Angelo is an avatar through whom Simon delivers remarks about chess which evidently the speaker's on-screen companions do not understand while the audience is presumed to comprehened and to enjoy the "secret" communication, the simply coded communion with the white author speaking from behind the black thug mask, from behind the blackface, a code incredibly simple but still too complicated for the black thugs to catch on to, out in the open. "Kunta Kinte, yabba dabba dabba do"... The white writer even displaces his own talent-less-ness, his lack of wit, his crassness and unoriginality, onto his black surrogate(s).
*In another scene in the series, Bunk, the Wendell Pierce character, makes a prejudiced remark disparaging Greeks. His white partner, enlightened cosmopolitan, scolds him: "Lay off the Greeks, they invented civilisation," to which he, black parochial xenophobe and homophobe, replies " - and ass fucking."
This remark is often attributed to Fredric Jameson. The attribution is not entirely without reason as it is in Jameson’s oeuvre that the suggestion first appears. (In "Future City" in the New Left Review in 2003)* The mot does not make its debut as an observation of Jameson’s own, however, but as the reported insight of some author whose identity has slipped Jameson's mind:
But cyberpunk is not really apocalyptic, and I think the better coordinate is Ballard, the Ballard of the multiple ‘end-of-the-worlds’, minus the Byronic melancholy and the rich orchestral pessimism and Weltschmerz.
For it is the end of the world that is in question here; and that could be exhilarating if apocalypse were the only way of imagining that world’s disappearance (whether we have to do here with the bang or the whimper is not the interesting question). It is the old world that deserves the bile and the satire, this new one is merely its own self-effacement, and its slippage into what Dick called kipple or gubble, what LeGuin once described as the buildings ‘melting. They were getting soggy and shaky, like jello left out in the sun. The corners had already run down the sides, leaving great creamy smears.’ Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.
Did someone in fact once say this? Not exactly. What Jameson imperfectly recalls here – a faint memory stirred up by the topic of J. G. Ballard and apocalypse – is almost certainly the Marxist militant and literary critic H. Bruce Franklin’s 1979 essay “What Are We To Make Of Ballard’s Apocalypse?” In it Franklin never suggests that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" but observes that because of his condition within imperialism, white supremacism and capitalism – his position as white petty bourgeois intellectual in the core of a challenged and crumbling empire – J. G. Ballard is predisposed to "mistaking the end of capitalism for the end of the world". The type of thinking and ideological indoctrination which would characterise someone for whom it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" is fairly simply described:
Underlying the elaborate verbal structure of the late fiction are some fairly simple, in fact simple-minded, ideas about social reality. Indeed, the formal pyrotechnics disguise as much as they reveal of the ideational content. Clad in an elegant costume is the tired old idea that human nature is basically brutish and stupid, that people are inherently perverse, cruel, and self destructive, and that's why the modern world is going to hell. High-Rise, his latest novel, is virtually a parody of this notion. Such a vision, I believe, is merely a projection of Ballard's own class point of view, a myopia as misleading as the national and racial point of view in the earlier novels and intimately related to that narrow outlook.
The essay, much discussed at the time of its publication, concludes with a potent question that one must assume engraved it into Jameson's memory, though not so deep that a couple of decades couldn't obscure it:
Ballard's imagined world is reduced to the dimensions of that island created by intertwined expressways on which individuals in their cellular commodities hurtle to their destruction or that apartment complex in which the wealthy and professional classes degenerate into anarchic tribal warfare among themselves. And hence Ballard accurately, indeed magnificently, projects the doomed social structure in which he exists. What could Ballard create if he were able to envision the end of capitalism as not the end, but the beginning, of a human world?
One immediately notices how the revision accomplished by Jameson’s hazy memory performs the same depoliticisation and idealisation of critical product that more deliberate misreadings and misrepresentations in the 80s and onward undertook in a more systematic way as a central part of the successful effort to eradicate Marxist practise and replace Marxism as a method of interpretation with the new post-structuralist flavours of liberalism/neo-liberalism. The transformation of H. Bruce Franklin’s Marxist analysis of the ideology of Ballard and his genre into Jameson’s vague quip in Hegelese regarding the disposition of some amorphous and unspecified Geist of the Zeit perfectly exemplifies the relentless, Orwellian cultural strategy which characterised the Reagan era’s political reaction in culture.
It’s not very surprising that this maximally vague observation that no one ever made, with its infantile solipsism resembling that of Ballard’s protagonists (while watching Independence Day , I of the imperial core petty bourgeoisie feel it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, therefore it is easier for everyone) and its occlusions (of class, of property relations, of the non-homogeneity of the material situation of all humanity) which match that of his novels, should become so popular an adage, at the same time that it becomes common for self-described radical critics of mass and pop culture to cease to regard the objects of their study as concrete products produced in definite historical conditions and encrusted with meanings accessible to interpretation and attribute to them instead the status of miraculous messengers of encrypted eternal, universal truths.
*Correction: the origin of the quip seems to be as Zizek's misquotation of Jameson from the early 90s.
Jameson wrote:
Even after the ‘end of history’ there has seemed to persist some historical curiosity of a generally systemic – rather than merely anecdotal – kind: not merely to know what will happen next, but as a more general anxiety about the larger fate or destiny of our system or mode of production. On this, individual experience (of a postmodern kind) tells us that it must be eternal, while our intelligence suggests this feeling to be most improbable indeed, without coming up with plausible scenarios as to its disintegration or replacement. It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; and perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.
I have come to think the word 'postmodern' ought to be reserved for thoughts of this kind.
The portrait of cultural and ideological 'postmodernity' is elaborated further on:
What we now begin to feel, therefore – and what begins to emerge as some deeper and more fundamental constitution of postmodernity itself, at least in its temporal dimension – is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer. This is the sense of the revival of that ‘end of history’ Alexandre Kojève thought he could find in Hegel and Marx, and which he took to mean some ultimate achievement of democratic equality (and the value equivalence of individual economic and juridical subjects) in both American capitalism and Soviet communism, only later identifying a significant variant of it in what he called Japanese 'snobisme', but that we can today identify as postmodernity itself (the free play of masks and roles without content or substance). In another sense, of course, this is simply the old ‘end of ideology’ with a vengeance, and cynically plays on the waning of collective hope in a particularly conservative market climate. But the end of history is also the final form of the temporal paradoxes we have tried to dramatize here; namely that a rhetoric of absolute change (or ‘permanent revolution’ in some trendy and meretricious new sense) is, for the postmodern, no more satisfactory (but not less so) than the language of absolute identity and unchanging standardization cooked up by the great corporations, whose concept of innovation is best illustrated by the neologism and the logo and their equivalents in the real of built space, ‘lifestyle’ corporate culture and psychic programming.
...as Fredric Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming ‘breakdown of nature’, of the stoppage of all life on earth – it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe.
2002 Or take Chomsky. There are two problematic features in his work — though it goes without saying that I admire him very much. One is his anti-theorism. A friend who had lunch with him recently told me that Chomsky announced that he'd concluded that social theory and economic theory are of no use — that things are simply evident, like American state terror, and that all we need to know are the facts. I disagree with this.
2009 I met a guy who recently had lunch with Chomsky and he told me that Chomsky said something very sad: Chomsky said that today we don't need theory.
