4A - The Michigan Daily - Monday, March 11, 2002 OP/ED 0 cat 1tE firtr4tgFat ttilg 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 letters@michigandaily.com EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JON SCHWARTZ Editor in Chief JOHANNA HANINK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE Since we intend to win the global war on terrorism, we can reasonably expect more detainees as a result of Operation Anaconda." - Marine Brigadier General Michael Lehnert, as quoted yesterday by CNN, on the approval of the construction of 408 new modular jail cells at Guantanamo Bay. THOMAS KULJURGIS TENTATIVELY SPEAKING G .a Au,,q LI V ESE GUYS PUT OP A CETTM& S $UD tf& MUST1T>E AI TD j GET SUrn'rT... I I Sports, Part 2: The great diversion JOHANNA HANINK PARLANCE OF OUR TIMES A I went to my first Michigan hockey game this weekend. "Yost is the greatest place in the world," the friend I went with told me. "I love it." I loved it too. And I wasn't surprised. In my last column I wrote about how people's sports loyalties are often, on some level, arbitrary. We don't usually know the players. We may live in the right city or go to the right school, but beyond that, there isn't much else that makes us decide which color jerseys we'll be cheering for and which color jer- seys we'll be swearing at. But, despite the reality that these sort of decisions are grounded in chance, that doesn't necessarily invalidate them. At Yost on Saturday night, I wanted Michigan to win. I liked it when the crowd told the other team's players that they were ugly. It's a sad thing that sports had to be the insti- tution that I wanted to make an example of. Athletics push the human body to the extremes. They provide entertainment and beyond that a culture that everyone feels like he or she can have some part in. Sports bring people together. Sports, indeed, are a good thing. What scares me, however, is not the athletics or the culture that athletics as a cultural institu- tion entails. What is disconcerting is what that culture tells us about what we're not paying attention to. These columns are not about sports. They are about the media and what the media tells us to pay attention to. The average sports fan on the street, as I wrote in my last column, has an unbelievable amount of sports esoterica that can be tapped in an instant. Batting averages, yards rushed, dates, numbers and names - it's all there, processed, organized and analyzed. And the American media loves it. It loves that there is some appeal that sports have to the primal in all of us. Last night ESPN's first movie debuted, "A Season on the Brink," the story of the infamous 1985-86 Hoosiers basket- ball season (infamous in no small part due to a conference championship loss to Michigan) and the legendary coach Bobby Knight. The subject material of this movie holds an enormous amount of interest for millions of people. But while we're counting Knight's exple- tives, we're inevitably missing out on something else going on in the world. We're diverted. And this is what it comes down to: Sports as the great diversion. Nothing wrong with sports, per se, but something wrong with what it seems to mutually exclude. Noam Chomsky, in a talk at the Z Media Institute in June of 1997, made my point much better than I can (and he did it in one para- graph): "The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don't bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn't serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. 'We' take care of that." So while we're counting touchdowns or tab- ulating field goal percentages because the "agenda-setting" media (The New York Times, and what grows exponentially scarier, Fox News) tells us that is what we should be doing, someone else is doing what we could just as easily be doing with all of that natural intelli- gence that we've got. They're paying attention to the world. Call it conspiracy-theorist. It wouldn't be the first time that Chomsky heard that epithet hurled in his direction. But he makes a strong point: We're diverted. We want Olympics on the front page of the Times. We want sports. We want scandals. We want sports scandals! Perhaps no other example is more com- pelling than this year's Super Bowl. The event illustrated Chomsky's point perfectly; a point that he also makes in the Canadian-produced Chomsky-biographical film "Manufacturing Consent:" "(Sports) is a way of building up irra- tional attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements, in fact it's training in irrational jingoism ... That's why energy is devoted to supporting them ... and advertisers are willing to pay for them. In the case of the Super Bowl, it was the American government. It was ads that told us that if we did drugs we support terrorism. At no other time in this nation's (or the Super Bowl's) history would that sort of government advertis- ing had such a chance to work. They fund the diversion (sports) and manipulate our energy and submission to that diversion with ads that, taken out of context and examined rationally, are ridiculous and base manipulations of the Sept. 11 tragedies. Sports themselves are not the problem (unless you're a soccer dad in Cambridge, Mass - a whole different story). How they're used to manipulate us and what we sacrifice in our unapologetic devotion to what is, unmistakably a diversion, is what should make us reevaluate not necessarily the athletics of a culture, but a culture of athletics. This was the second of a two-part series. Johanna Hanink can be reached atjhanink@umich.edu. I 0 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR YAF not composed of 'dark, evil, right-winged overlords;' God bless America TO THE DAILY: As a proud member of Young Ameri- cans for Freedom and next year's Chair- man, I am greatly disappointed by the recent malicious attack on this organiza- tion. The Daily's editorial (Right-wing rhetoric, 2/8/02) willingly obfuscates the truth about YAF especially when compar- ing YAF to the Coalition to Defend Affir- mative Action By Any Means Necessary. YAF is an activist group based on free market ideas, traditional value, and some other generally American ideals. We do not use militancy and unlike other organi- zations like BAMN, we are composed entirely of students - science majors, even engineers, humanities majors, etc. We are patriotic Americans who share similar views and beliefs, and we are a reasonable voice on campus. We do not hunt down and attack students for being different - contrary to how the editorial portrays us. The editorial further accuses YAF of try- ing to "limit the boundaries of dialogue and undermine the activist spirit of this campus." Can someone please explain to me how an activist group engaged in activism actually undermines activism? I sincerely hope the Daily would get its facts straight about YAF and not portray us as an orga- nization composed of dark, evil, right- winged overlords. We're students too and we want to use the University to express our points of view as well. Is that too much to ask? God Bless America. DEAN WANG LSA senior LETTERS POLICY The Michigan Daily welcomes letters from all of its readers. Letters from University students, faculty, staff and administrators will be given priority over others. Letters should include the writer's name, college and school year or other University affiliation. The Daily will not print any letter containing statements that cannot be veri- fied. Letters should be kept to approximately 300 words. The Michigan Daily reserves the right to edit for length, clarity and accuracy. Longer "viewpoints" may be arranged with an editor. Letters will be run according to order received and the amount of space available. Letters should be sent over e-mail to letters@michigandaily.com or mailed to the Daily at 420 Maynard St. Editors can be reached via e-mail at editpage.editors@umich.edu. Letters e-mailed to the Daily will be given priority over those dropped off in person or sent via the U.S. Postal Service. 0 VIEWPOINT -PART 1 OF 2 BAMN responds to the Daily's "negative coverage" BY AGNES ALEOBUA BEN ROYAL The main theme of the Feb. 13 Daily editori- al attacking the Coalition to Defend Affinmative Action By Any Means Necessary (By reasonable means: BAMN polarizes, hurts affirmative action dialogue) was that BAMN's "divisive rhetoric" has weakened the defense of affirmative action. The editorial implies that BAMN has alienated moderate allies, marginalized the defense of affirmative action to a "radical fringe" and thereby harmed the defense of affirmative action. None of these accusations is true. This view- point is an attempt to get out the truth of what we have done and the significance of the strug- gle which we find ourselves leading. With the two affirmative action lawsuits cur- rently under consideration by the Federal Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, the University is under the direct threat of resegregation. This reality is a wake-up call for students on this campus. Either victory or defeat in Cincinnati leads to Washington D.C. and the United States Supreme Court where national law on affirma- tive action will be made by the high court's decision in the two Universitv cases. Our cam- mative action and have done everything we could to mobilize support for the University's affirmative action policy. The necessity of BAMN's legal intervention can be understood from several different angles. First, the University administration, follow- ing the supportable and important but too nar- row standing legal precedent, has focused on the defense of affirmative action as a means to achieve educational diversity. For BAMN and the new civil rights movement, this defense, while absolutely necessary, is also inadequate. The real motivation for affirmative action both in history and in the minds of the overwhelming majority of people who support it, is not diversi- ty - which, in its most conservative interpreta- tion dovetails with tokenism - it is the struggle for integration and equality. Affirmative action is the practical social pol- icy that aims at lessening the institutional inequalities that structure life and opportunity in America; it must be defended on that plain basis if it is to win in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Affirmative action measures are desegregation programs in higher education and employment. BAMN entered into the law- suit as intervenors to raise these basic arguments in favor of equality and the robust integration that is the only means to achieve equality in A m,.;e action litigation. Our case included extensive expert testimony on segregation, education poli- cy, standardized testing and a whole range of issues put forward by some of the leading schol- ars in America: John Hope Franklin, Eric Foner, Gary Orfield, Walter Allen, Eugene Garcia, Frank Wu and more. Despite this, District Court Judge Bernard Friedman, in an ideological and intellectually dishonest decision that ignored that great weight of evidence put forward at trial, ruled against affirmative action in the Law School case. The fact of BAMN's having fought for and won a trial means that the Law School case has the most developed legal and sociological record of any case of its kind. Our trial and its record have become touchstones in race and gender litigation and scholarship in the year since we organized it. (Recently, the Daily referred in an editorial against the SAT to the expert testimony of Martin Shapiro and Jay Rosner, two of BAMN's trial witnesses who addressed questions of bias in standardized test- ing-having brought forward these two witnesses is part of the "harm" we have done to the affir- mative action dialogue.) The third and most important reason for our intervention into the Law School case has been to link the legal cases to the growing civil rights movement. It is BAMN'S contention that litiga- tie- an 1 1PC ainnalna xrdl .nn .. E± l. *.