The summer of 1994 saw “America’s pastime” jettisoned at mid-season. This marked a most bizarre, and even to this day, unpredictable turn of events. Compounding the confusion and bitter bewilderment of baseball fans all across America was the startling fact that both sides in the conflict — the team owners and the players — were making more money, prior to the strike, than any of their predecessors.
Karl Marx would have been most amused at the spectacle of millionaires who “labor” at playing a kids games six months out of the year striking against billionaires who could spend $5,000 a day for over a thousand years and still have money to spend for a couple of thousand more years; squabbling over who should get what future increased percentage of future revenues. In the post-atomic age of the microchip technological revolution, supply-side economic theorems, etc., the class struggle lives on.
Cold shower
It ground to a halt, in this sacred bastion of the American culture, the voyeuristic enthusiasm of millions of Mike and Mary Middleclass’s (much to their dismay), who would daily cram into stadiums and sports bars, spending over a billion dollars annually on things related to this “game.” A bit of excitement and fantasy in their limited lives. For a couple of hours you could escape, be totally caught up in cheering “your” team on to victory. You could actually leave the arena or television set with a good feeling inside that like “your” team, you too were a “winner” in this culture of losers. But not anymore! The very grind that you sought relief from has smothered even this fleeting personal satisfaction. Heroes for hire The rude awakening is likewise for the players as well. They were riding the ride of every schoolboy’s dream: to keep on playing the game and get a comparatively lavish lifestyle for their efforts. Now ignore just for a minute the illogic of an economic system that rewards these men so richly for doing something that in and of itself is useless. All the while in the real world people are “rewarded” with poverty for doing socially indispensable tasks such as … well, you can name almost any occupation that impacts your life directly, and it is performed by wage-slaves who can only dream about what some of these guys make. These apostles of hype have transcended the everyday grind of the class struggle that we must endure: ironically, only to be put down by the very class struggle they thought they had escaped (Twilight Zone-style, admittedly, but class struggle nonetheless).
The owners and players clashed so hard that their interest was knocked clean out of the ballparks and crashed in on the National Hockey League (NHL) arenas. The hockey-team owners locked the players out until they would agree to the same demands that the baseball players were striking against. Many IHL [International Hockey League] players were drafted up into the NHL big leagues, thinking that their schoolboy fantasy had come true, only to find out that there would be no NHL mobile games or even a season to play in. They had mastered a profession that evaporated like a mirage just as they stepped into its highest level.
Unraveling of the “games”
An enigmatic plot twist that seems as though it came from the combined subconscious ethos of Karl Marx and Rod Serling. But this isn’t one man’s nightmare run amok. This is life in the 90s. The unraveling of these “games” just goes to show that no matter how new the world order, how big the pie, how solid the supply, how great the tax break, life under capitalism is just not enough for human satisfaction.
If these hype-driven heroes making so much doing so little feel they don’t have it made and their billionaire bosses making even more for doing absolutely nothing socially useful or entertaining can’t get “enough,” what makes you think you are ever going to work or entrepreneur yourself into making it in this system? Well, the simple answer is to lower your sights and Praise the Lord for the culture of limitations. By accepting second-best and a life of servitude as your highest ambition, you will succeed in grasping/stooping to it.
Unlike Rod Serling, on the other hand, socialists argue that we should all go beyond aspiring to a fool’s satisfaction. We should all team up to win this social game of class struggle once and for all. For we have only our frustrations and limitations to lose — and the ultimate human satisfaction of winning not just the game but the world.
W.J. Lawrimore
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