LCV Winter 2013-14 - (Page 3)

THE CHOICES WE MAKE DEFINE US Editor-in-Chief/LEH President It was midnight music, birthed on the creative cusp between Saturday night and Sunday morning, the trumpets so sharp and clear they could have been made of glass, the chorus alternately swaying and chanting, moaning and praying, strains of Revelations in one section, all Shaka Zulu the next. The occasion was a rare homecoming for New Orleans' most distinguished musical prodigy of a generation, Wynton Marsalis, leading his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra from the back row of the brass section, fronting for the hundred-person-strong Abyssinian Baptist Church Choir directed by the magnetic Damien Sheer. The historic Saenger Theatre, technically in the Creole faubourg of Treme across the North Rampart Street border with the French Quarter, was gleaming with a $52 million renovation, capable of seating 2,600, but occupied by a bare third of that number, about as many people as between the 48th and 50th yard lines at a Saints game, though the tickets cost less. But perhaps few knew about the concert, since it was featured on the front page of the newspaper, and not in the sports section. The performance was not even competing with the football game, as the home team was out of town and already had lost earlier in the afternoon. What does one say about a culture so self-debasing that pays so much lip service and advertising to its love of jazz and its pride in its indigenous origins but does not actually support it? Who needs enemies, foreign or domestic, when we value ourselves in so paltry a fashion? I have long agonized over the modest audiences too often garnered for the humanities at learned and informed events, but never again. The problem clearly does not lie with the humanities but with humanity itself. Executive Editor/Art Director MICHAEL SARTISKY, Ph.D. The Second Half While I realize it's the third rail of public discourse in Louisiana, and most of America, to criticize football, on a related topic to the above I commend to your attention the just released monumental piece of investigative reporting, Gregg Easterbrook's The King of Sports: Football's Impact on America. By about page 83, I was already working on my third cardiac infarction, especially in the section on the revising of the IRS code- at the behest of NFL lobbyists and attorneys-to include professional football among the tax exempt entities, a status normally reserved for schools, universities, social service agencies, museums and other cultural institutions-in short, noncommercial activities generally understood to be for the public good and not involving the profit motive. But unlike these traditional beneficiaries, the individual NFL teams, with the curious exception of the Green Bay Packers, are for the most part owned by for-profit, family-dominated and administered corporations with relatives filling most of the upper echelons. So nonprofit is the NFL that it pays $30 million a year to the CEO it calls a Commissioner, about what 50 or 60 university presidents would make collectively. The public funding of the stadiums alone-in states and cities that claim they cannot afford schools, universities, police or health care-was worth a mortal heart attack. Easterbrook has a sizable section specifically on the Saints' financial extortion and rape of Louisiana and New Orleans, though one has to admit the populace pretty much willingly complied. One of the gnawing ironies is how these greedy, hypocritical teams and their owners encourage fan loyalty while holding them hostage to the extortionate threat of leaving town if their monetary demands are not met. Apparently loyalty is not a two-way street. Of course, the bare mention of most of this by the media (both print and television)-especially the economic consequences and who benefits, a subject Easterbrook addresses in detail-makes them shamefully complicit. Small wonder the faithful blindly swallow the bogus economic impact arguments that the teams' PR offices pump out, being bereft of any contradictory facts from the media. Follow the money, stupid. We are in effect a nation addicted to a brutal and ultimately meaningless spectacle that we sanctify more than the platitudes we say really represent our values. Consider the demented civic pride induced in Seattle where decibel levels of the crowd yelling at the recent Saints game exceeded the roar of a jet engine. Not exactly the right milieu for thoughtful reflection or aesthetic appreciation. Perhaps they were just overcaffeinated. It is very telling that the radical inflation of football salaries and costs is a compensating sociological phenomenon of just the last half century, paralleling America's own decline since the post-war era. As students of culture, it also is interesting to reflect on what life was like in the preceding centuries when such mass spectacles did not exist and to consider what it is about our own culture and society that makes football such a perfect paradigm for what we have become. This is journalism that matters, even if no one really cares. Like jazz. DAVID JOHNSON Associate Editors CATHE MIZELL-NELSON RON THIBODEAUX Layout/Graphic Designer TOAN NGUYEN Associate Media Editor ROMY MARIANO Copy Editor JAN CLIFFORD Contributors SALLY ASHER THOMAS AIELLO, Ph.D. RICHARD CAMPANELLA JESSICA DORMAN S. DERBY GISCLAIR CYBÈLE GONTAR ISABELLE HAYEUR KAREN KINGSLEY, Ph.D. JOHN LAWRENCE RICHARD MCCABE GERALD T. MCNEILL SALLY MAIN MICHAEL MIZELL-NELSON, Ph.D. OWEN MURPHY DAVID RAE MORRIS MATT SAKAKEENY, Ph.D. BEN SANDMEL JESSICA H. SCHEXNAYDER THOMAS USKALI -Michael Sartisky, Ph.D. Editor-In-Chief Winter 2013-14 * LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 3  http://www.leh.org/html/lcv.html

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