Barry Bonds and the Steroids Question, By: Norman Markowitz

5-07-06

Having written an article earlier for PA online on the "steroids" issue and baseball, which I continue to follow as closely as I do general political economic trends (and as a Dodger fan with similar feelings of short term despair, even though Marxist analysis offers much more hope for American workers than for the Dodgers) I find the very recent developments sadly interesting.

The major points that I had made earlier were that steroids use was deeply connected to a win at all costs way of life (a sort of "jungle capitalism") and that athletes were convenient scapegoats for a Congress which doesn’t regulate the larger economy (in part because its campaign contributors wouldn’t tolerate that); doesn’t address major national social and health problems either (this was before the Bird Flu crisis or even Hurricane Katrina); and sees "punishment" for both victims and minor perpetrators (or "perps" as they say on the police TV shows) as a "policy" that is best for their own image enhancement.

However, Barry Bonds is currently two home runs away from passing Babe Ruth on the lifetime home run list and he is under investigation. (True baseball fans know that there are more important things than home runs, but baseball capitalists sell the Long Ball as the games most exciting event.) Baseball is keeping a healthy distance from one of its most profitable commodities.

Labor is commodity and, however, much he is paid, Bonds is one of the skilled workers who makes baseball as a product possible. The owners could disappear as they did decades ago in Cuba and (perhaps) may in Venezuela, but the game would still be produced and produced well, as it continues to be in Cuba.

The owners need Bonds on one level, but they have no loyalty or even respect for him and his achievements—no more than the Hollywood studio owners had for the writers and directors whom they threw to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) wolves in 1947.

These writers and directors made the studio owners a great deal of profit in the 1930s and 1940s and their loss not only hurt motion pictures as a creative enterprise but Hollywood as a profit producing industry. But Hollywood studio bosses always believed that there were other writers, actors, and directors to replace the blacklist victims as Major League Baseball owners believe that there are always other players, even great home run hitters, to replace the stars of the moment.

In my first article, I did compare what was going on somewhat tongue in cheek to HUAC’s Hollywood hearings in 1947, but now things are getting a bit hotter as they did after those hearings. In 1948, HUAC held hearings on "communist infiltration" of the Roosevelt and Truman administration’s as a ploy to defeat Truman’s 1948 election campaign (for the campaign, Truman largely shut down domestic red-baiting and even cold war issues and ran on a program to establish National Health Insurance, repeal the anti-Labor Taft-Hartley Law, and other progressive programs to revive the New Deal – programs that he called a Fair Deal).

During the hearings, HUAC trotted out a relatively unknown writer and Time magazine editor, Whittaker Chambers, who accused a former New Deal official and current head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Alger Hiss, of being involved in "communist circles" in the New Deal government in the 1930s. Congressman Richard Nixon of HUAC orchestrated the attack on Hiss, who came across as both cold and arrogant in the mass media that highlighted his hostile responses to the committee (ignoring of course that he had very, very good reasons to be outraged at what the committee was trying to do to him).

After Truman won the election (and in the face of press reports that the administration might seriously fight back against HUAC) Chambers showed Nixon and HUAC’s chief investigator microfilm of "secret state department documents" that he had hidden in a Pumpkin on his Maryland farm and the press was off and running these "Pumpkin papers" as the basis for Soviet espionage allegations. Hiss was tried twice for perjury(the first trial ended in a hung jury) eventually convicted and imprisoned for four years, a scarlet S for subversion branded on him as an object lesson for all liberals and progressives who might have anything to do with Communists.

I have gone into this lengthy account of the Hiss case because the media which uses standard plots as much as Hollywood and TV is in my opinion treating Barry Bonds as the Alger Hiss of professional athletes. Charges have been made against him and others by ex steroid user Jose Canseco and other not so reputable sources, the kind of sources whose charges filled the newspapers in the late 1940s.

People don’t like Bonds because they perceive him as arrogant and cold (not the pugnacious arrogance of Alger Hiss, an attorney, but a passive aggressive narcissism that has led to a career of conflicts with the mass media who make their living providing filler about his athletic and personal exploits). The issue of perjury connected to politically motivated investigations is also at the center of present discussions.

Just as there were sensationalistic exposes published in the mass press and Soviet defector and "ex-Communist" memoirs published and widely disseminated in the early cold war era(one journalist even won a Pulitzer for articles "exposing" the CPUSA which were based on dubious information leaked by the FBI), the New York Times this week is highlighting in its book review section books about Bonds (not Delay or Ken Lay or the Halliburton gang). Chapter one of "Game of Shadows," which has garnered more general media attention than the many serious works by former government officials and investigative journalists highlighting the impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration, is even being presented on the NYT online edition.

Although my strong "Dodgercentric" worldview makes it difficult for me to have too much sympathy for Bonds as an individual (given what he has as a Giant done to the Dodgers over the years) there are serious issues here.

Professional Athletes provide working class people and the general population (males primarily) with a major form of ongoing interest and entertainment, something that they can follow, believe in, and understand with some confidence. Professional athletes are also drawn very heavily from working class and minority populations (as are entertainers) because there is a genuine "merit system" involved here, not one of having the big money to go to the right schools, the right fraternities, the right clubs and have the right "mentors" to guide you in and up the networks of wealth, privilege, and power.

The class privileges of the owners and executives who buy into and sell teams and hire and fire their subordinates has little to do with the development of the game, which depends on verifiable achievement, not the accumulation for wealth for its own sake. Everybody in the industry, from the owners to the reporters, lives off the athletes, as everyone in every industry lives off its workers (even if in this industry, the workers are a small group of super skilled people who are able to earn millions of dollars by their skills).

Fine athletes deserve to earn good livings—better than stock brokers and certainly better than corporate yes men who serve at worst characters like Ken Lay and at best merely seek to expand profits by cutting labor costs.

It would be better for everyone in the United States if something like a socialist standard existed in the game, not state capitalist "revenue sharing or "salary caps." By a socialist standard I mean that the highest paid player on a team could only earn something like four times what the lowest paid player was earning, the minor leagues would be developed with a much better higher living standard for minor league players and fans would be able to afford to see more games both major and minor league games at low cost—that the egalitarianism which is also an important part of team sports along with the competition "trickle down" to both the non star players and the fans.

For that to happen though, fans have got to stop resenting athletes who are the basis of their being fans and start resenting much more the owners who have undermined whole sports with their corporate arrogance, are building expensive new stadiums filled with luxury boxes with tax payer money and, like the Hollywood Studio bosses in 1947, are ready and willing to "sacrifice" the players, the men and women who are their industry with the hypocritical argument that they are "protecting the integrity" of the industry or in this case the game.