I’m a newly-minted baseball fan. Suddenly, after close to forty years of simply not giving a damn about sports of any kind, I am a rabid baseball-a-holic and diehard supporter of the St. Louis Cardinals.
It happened last year, when the Cards, in one of the most dramatic World Series games ever (Game 5, bottom of the eleventh, two outs, two strikes, bases loaded, David Freese belts in a grand slam homer) defeated the Texas Rangers.
In other words, the team once owned by Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis' oldest and most beloved business which, thanks to George W. Bush, was picked up at a bargain-basement price by the Belgians, defeated the team once owned by Dubya hisself.
If you don’t see cosmic significance in that, you’re crazy.
My old Midwestern rust belt city’s jaw-dropping ass-smacking of Dubya’s Rangers at the eleventh hour turned me, formerly indifferent verging on hostile to professional sports, into a fan. Since then, I’ve been watching baseball, and the issues surrounding it, with a lot of interest. And it frequently strikes me that baseball, that quintessentially American sport, is a flashpoint for many other issues which with Americans wrestle.
For example, the latest brouhaha engendered by Florida Marlins’ GM Ozzie Guillen’s comments on Fidel Castro.
For those of you living in hermetic isolation who missed it, Ozzie Guillen recently gave a magazine interview wherein he said he admired Fidel Castro for his ability to stay in power and flip off the world’s biggest, baddest superpower from less than 90 miles off its coast for more than 50 years.
Now, while it is less than a ringing endorsement of unqualified support for all the aspects of El Jefe’s character (and honestly, considering the old bastard has survived a zillion cockamamie U.S. plots to kill him, including, but not limited to, planting explosives in his cigars, who DOESN’T have a sneaking admiration for him?), it still wasn’t the smartest thing to say. Not if you’re the GM of a team in a city where exiles from Castro’s Cuba make up a big chunk of the city’s population and wield a hell of a lot of political and economic clout.
Couple of things to point out here. One, Ozzie is Venezuelan by birth. And after more than a hundred years of essential U.S. colonization and tyranny, it’s understandable that the Venezuelans might be oriented more towards Castro than towards Washington . Ask Hugo Chavez. He sure is.
Two, Fidel Castro, as son-of-a-bitch dictators go, is a little lower on the Satanic Maleficence of Son-Of-A-Bitch Dictators scale than, say, Saddam Hussein. Or Muammar Khadafy. Or the Kims of North Korea . Or the Assads of Syria . Or the Saudi royal family. Or Kony. Or Idi Amin. Or General Suharto.
Predictably, though, Miami's rabidly anti-Communist and Republican Cubans—who, thanks to their economic success and thick concentration in Dade County, have a hell of a lot of political influence—went absolutely loco. They choked on their cigars, spilled their mojitos all over their white suits, and frothed at the mouth with holy righteous indignation that someone said something about Fidel Castro that didn’t end with, “...and demons should sodomize him with fire-ant covered rattlesnakes in hell forever and ever, amen.”
Ozzie called a press conference, apologized profusely, said he’d been “misquoted,” that he "hated Castro," that he’d been “thinking in Spanish and speaking in English,” and essentially stumbled over his own dick in an attempt to backtrack faster than Mitt Romney in a room full of pro-lifers and show how sorry he was by groveling like a prison bitch.
And the Marlins, just to show Miami ’s Cubans just how appalled, shocked, indignant, and aflame with holy righteous indignation they were, suspended him for five games.
Something about this rubs me the wrong way.
Dumb thing to say? Well, yeah. But Ozzie Guillen broke neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of Major League Baseball. Poor judgment or not, he exercised the basic American right of free speech. Ironically, a right which, presumably, Miami ’s Cuban exiles came here to enjoy. And he was penalized for it.
My father makes the point that while he has the right to say what he said, the Marlins, likewise, have the right to suspend or fire him. Legally, it appears my dad is right. They do. But I’m not sure they should. It’s illegal for corporations and companies to punish, penalize or discriminate on the bases of race, religion, age, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation. Those categories are all protected classes. Why, then, is it acceptable and legal in the United States to penalize someone for exercising their constitutional right to free speech?
Regardless as to why it’s legal, it is. Which raises, in my mind, an even more disturbing issue. The First Amendment protects our right of free speech from the government. But free speech does not seem to have any protection whatsoever from corporate power, the ability of which to muzzle American citizens grows apace.
This scares the shit out of me. It should scare you, too.
What I wish the Marlins had done is issue a statement saying, “The Florida Marlins neither endorse nor agree with the statements made by our General Manager. We, like you, think Fidel Castro is an asshole. However, inasmuch as he made those comments as a private citizen and did not claim to speak for this organization as a whole, there’s really nothing we can do about it, so kindly fuck off and take your goddamned protest signs with you.”
Putting principle above profit would have been the morally laudable thing to do. But they didn’t. And, more to the point, they couldn’t. You see, they’re a corporation. And corporations are, by definition, incapable of acting in a moral fashion.
This is not to say that they always act in an immoral fashion. They don’t take the low road any more than they take the high road. They are utterly amoral entities. Low road and high road, right and wrong, moral and immoral, are immaterial. They always take the profitable road, because that’s the only one they’re capable of taking.
It is illegal—a prosecutable crime—for the directors of publicly held corporations to act in any manner, or perform any action, that may jeopardize the corporation’s profitability. Even if it's the right thing to do.
Now, they dress this amorality up in fancy, high-falutin’, altruistic-sounding language: “We, the directors of this publicly-held entity, have a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard the economic well-being of our shareholders.”
It sure sounds nice. Look at the words they use. Public. Fiduciary. Well-being. Responsibility. Safeguard. Cripes, you’d think they were Mother Theresa.
But strip away all the high-blown rhetoric, and what they’re really saying is, “We’ll do whatever it takes to make money, regardless of whom or what we fuck over in the process.”
This has terrifying implications for American citizens. Because corporations are very good at making money—indeed, have a legal mandate to be very good at it—and because money is the mother’s milk of American politics, it means that the government has ordered corporations to take over, to the detriment of the citizenry.
Say that a corporation owns a manufacturing facility which produces toxic waste. And the people of the neighboring town, understandably, would prefer that said toxic waste not seep into their groundwater, get blown into their air, or settle all over their crops.
The moral thing, of course, would be to truck it away somewhere safe, or, better yet, find a way to make your shit without generating poison. But corporations can’t act morally. They can only act profitably. So if it’s cheaper for them to hire lobbyists, form PACs, make political contributions, subvert democracy, and get the laws rewritten so that it’s perfectly legal for them to dispose of their toxic waste wherever the hell they feel like it, that’s what they’ll do. Citizens be damned.
Essentially, corporations are, by definition and by legal mandate, sociopaths.
Which is why it was disheartening as hell to see the Marlins management take the weaselly way out instead of standing up for their employee and his Constitutional right to free speech. Disheartening. But not surprising.
Ozzie’s not alone. The list of public figures who’ve been taken down by the bitches’ brew of public indignation and the alacrity with which corporations move to protect their economic interests is getting pretty long.
Tragically, though, I’m afraid that Jimmy the Greek, Helen Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Tracey Morgan, and all the others who’ve been punished because of “offensive” things they’ve said are just the beginning. Their ordeals are merely the harbingers of something even worse. Corporations don’t care about the constitutional rights of Americans. They only care about their bottom lines, and if profitability depends on running roughshod over our rights, then it’s our rights that'll go. We have no recourse against them. And so long as they continue to increase their power, it’s only going to get worse.
You don’t have to like Helen Thomas, for example. You don’t have to agree with her assertion that the way to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East is “[for] all the Jews [to] leave Palestine and go back to Europe .” I don’t. But she shouldn’t have lost her job for saying it.
What the cases of Helen Thomas, Ozzie Guillen, Jimmy the Greek, and all the rest of them show is very simple: We have allowed corporations to criminalize dissent. And when dissenters have no protection, then we have no plurality of thought. And when that happens, democracy dies.
But who cares? So long as we still have baseball (and we will, so long as team ownership continues to turn a profit), will anyone miss democracy or even notice when it's gone?
Batter up.
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