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Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Paul Street at Jan 01, 2005

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I recently spent 5 evening hours on U.S. Interstate Highway 80, the semi-trailer-packed “main street of America.” Meanwhile, people in Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka were experiencing the worst natural human disaster to take place in a very long time. I searched the radio for the latest news and information about the terrible events, including especially anything on where to send assistance when I got home. Surely, I thought, such information would be widely available on the airwaves of the world's most “compassionate” and enlightened nation in these times of mass human suffering. Some of what I sought was available during the news hour on the one public radio station I could barely make out. After that, however, the main thing besides music on the radio was sports talk. This was the content on 3 of the 4 AM stations I picked up between Iowa and Chicago. On these stations, as the historic tragedy's official death toll was mounting, one could hear a passionate and often quite knowledgeable debate over the following critical issues: • why the Chicago Cubs (baseball) flopped at the end of the 2004 baseball season • why the Chicago Bears (football) had such a lousy season this year • how Notre Dame made the wrong football coaching choice at the end of this last season • why suspended Indiana Pacer (basketball) power forward Ron Artest deserves the scorn of humanity for his violent outburst in Detroit weeks ago • why Cubs center-fielder Corey Patterson will never be a legitimate “five-tool” player • how the Iowa Hawkeyes (college football) are preparing for a big victory in the Capital One Bowl, to be played on January 1st • what the forthcoming Rose Bowl contest (college football) might say about the relative strengths of the two schools' respective collegiate sports conferences And so on…the usual and in-itself innocuous sporting drivel that rules the AM dial. What made this normal radio discussion stand out in such bold relief to me was of course the backdrop of the unfolding tsunami tragedy. Hearing all this trivial talk at this particular moment was vaguely reminiscent of the creepy sensation I got upon seeing my first television commercials after advertising was suspended for about week after 9/11/2001 My sports radio revulsion peaked during one particularly dramatic segment on WGN AM 710, a Chicago station. Three hours into my drive, I listened with amazement to the fervent, impassioned, and almost ranting discourse of a Houston Fox TV “Sports Director” on “a topic I have been living with night and day for the last 6 weeks.” The question that has haunted this sports news coordinator for so long? Whether or not the Houston Astros (baseball) will be able to retain their bona-fide “five- tool” superstar Carlos Beltran at his “fair market rate” of $15 million a year for seven years. I said $15 million a year for seven years…for…playing baseball…(yes, the owners make more). Does the figure $15 million sound familiar? That was George W. Bush's initial offer to the tsunami victims, which later got shamed up to $35 million, where it still paled in comparison to the cost of the illegal and murderous occupation of Iraq – roughly $151 billion so far. The WGN radio hosts and the numerous callers agreed that Beltran is “well worth” the $105 million ($15 million X 7) price tag and expressed their hope that the Chicago Tribune Corporation (owner of both WGN and the Cubs) would honor their “civic” and “moral” obligation "to the people of Chicago” by “stepping up to the plate” and making a serious bid for Beltran. How far would $15 million (or for that matter $105 million) go in Sri Lanka, I wondered to myself. How far, I wondered, would it go in the ghettoes of Chicago's west and south sides, where many of thousands of black children lived in what social researchers call “deep poverty,” at less than half of the nation's notoriously low and inadequate poverty level? Nothing on the sports stations, however, could prepare me for the depth and degree of the disgust I felt when I picked up and briefly monitored two political talk radio stations. The right-wing hosts on these frequencies had struck a rich vein in their quest to spark their callers' white-hot anger. Caller after caller was phoning in to voice their outrage at a recent “Paris-based” (OECD) report showing that the United States devotes a relatively miniscule share of its vast national wealth to overseas humanitarian assistance. Also coming in for harsh rebuke were charges from within and beyond the hated United Nations to the effect that George W. Bush had been terribly delinquent and stingy in his response to the tsunami tragedy. “Don't these whiners know,” callers chimed in, to their hosts' gleeful agreement, “that America is the single most compassionate and benevolent nation on earth.” “We give and we give and we give some more,” one caller claimed, “and we never ask or say anything about the politics or the nature of the people we are supporting with our welfare. We give out of the goodness of the heart. And all they do is complain that it's not enough. Maybe we should just cut them all off and see what they say.” “If it wasn't for all our incredible, selfless, Christian charity,” another angry called opined, “all these governments and humanitarian organizations the United Nations would collapse overnight. What more do they want from us?” One caller used recent events as an opportunity to call for the dismantlement of the United Nations. After the UN is “taken down,” this caller said, “all these complainers will be back on our door, looking for some more welfare from good old rich Uncle Sam. These people make me sick.” Hosts and callers were particularly focused on the of-course damning “French” origins of the OECD report. They agreed that the relative share of a nation's wealth that goes to humanitarian causes is irrelevant – the only thing that matters is the absolute amount and by that measure America rules! I thought about calling in and trying to make some moderately sane points about: • the vastly disparate share of global resources that the US populace devours • the equally vast and disparate share of global waste and pollution the US populace generates • the ancient religious concept of tithing, which is based precisely on share of total wealth and not simply absolute amount • the role of US neo-liberal global economic policy in impoverishing nations and people across the globe, helping make them immeasurably more vulnerable than they ought to be to the ravages of natural calamities like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, mudslides, and tsunamis • the relatively paltry and yes stingy size of America's absolute humanitarian contribution, seen quite dramatically when it is compared to the “world's richest nation's” “defense” (empire) budget, including just its bloody and illegal occupation of Iraq (which has also killed more than 100,000 non-Americans) and/or to the gigantic tax cuts that George W. Bush has granted to his super-opulent ruling-class comrades • the routinely selective U.S. application and denial of US economic and humanitarian assistance in accordance with imperial US political objectives and related ideological biases I didn't make the call for two reasons. First, I don't like talking on the phone while I'm driving, especially when surrounded by 18-wheelers. Second, I don't think there's any meaningful dialogue to be had with the mass of racist, hyper-nationalist, proto-fascist pseudo-patriots who frequent the nation's rightist talk radio stations. These people are militantly hostile to any serious reflection that might cause them to question received authoritarian and imperial wisdom. It's better, I suppose, to get them focused back on things that mattter, like Carlos Beltran's struggle to earn the tens of millions that he so richly deserves.

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4101

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Servo, Tom at Jan 04, 2005 15:25 PM
OOPS! In the previosu post, the citation should have red "either "Downsize This!" or "Adventures in a TV Nation." "The Big One" was the film about his publicity tour for "Downsize This!". My feeling is that the stats and so forth came from "Downsize This!." If anyone has a copy, e-mail me and let me know , for I have donated my copies to the library. I hate getting old.

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4101

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Servo, Tom at Jan 04, 2005 02:35 AM
I have read where if credit lines and other loans are considered "gifts" (I do not consider a loan a gift), and if *military aid* is figured in, then yes, the US leads the world in aid. However, if only non-military aid is accounted for, then no, the US is far behind several countries in both per capita and total amount. In one of Michael Moore's books (either "The Big One" or "Adventures in a TV Nation"), he cites teh sources as well as attempts to ask other countries (Saudi Arabia, for example) to send relief to the worst parts of the US, including the Appalachgians and the Native American Reservations. The response from the Saudi gov't went something like "It would be odd for the KSA to give aid money to the USA."

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Street, Paul at Jan 03, 2005 20:17 PM
Here is link for Catholic Relief, which "joe" says I am probably against because it happens to be religious: www.kintera.org/htmlcontent. asp?cid=41794. Here is Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.as I did oxfam and UN Children's Relief above. See my comment at 3:41 pm December 28 on my December 27 post "Love Motivates Us to Kill the Enemy." There you can read me arguing against knee-jerk atheist Christian-/church-bashing by the left. mk I don't doubt you are right. Given absolute size of the US economy it's quite telling if in fact Japan leads US in absolute donations. Given sky-high US financial indebtedness to Europeans and others (by any calculation), it's fun to listen to US authorities rip supposedly inferior "European calculations" on anything.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Street, Paul at Jan 03, 2005 06:16 AM
Carlos Beltran is a symbol of the workers' struggle for a livable wage. Sure. No, screw Beltran (not even a lifetime .300 hitter BTW) and people who get excited about his salary not being high enough. How about dedicating his $105 million to help refund/expand Head Start in American inner cities or to a campaign for the reform of US labor law so that unions can more effectively people with ordinary levels of workng class marketplace bargaining power? And sure take the owners' profits and dedicate it to the same or whatever legitemate social program you desire As for the comment about US military being involved in tsunami relief, that's just absurd: I'd like to see full force of the US military converted to tsunamic assistance. What's "galling," Joe, is the comparison beteween $150 billion on illegal Iraq war versus what is it now $350 million for tsunami aid. The post is about the goofy and trivial priorities of many radio networks and Americans (sports over human tragedies on a mass scale) and about the savage nationalist arrogance of hosts and many callers on corporate talk radio.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Street, Paul at Jan 03, 2005 06:16 AM
Joe gets me on Bangladesh but after that it's downhill. I'm looking for radio, ok, to tell other people as yes I am aware of those avenues. Satellite radio: fine, does it go in cars? (I know nothing about it). As for just avoiding what's on the talk radio and listening to some relaxing music, no not a very a good point. I'm an American taxpayer and therefore it's my FCC that is giving the airwaves over to these corporate radio networks that won't give left talk show hosts a chance and who sponsor these proto-fascist pigs like Limbaugh and Hannity et. al (and sorry but Democracy Now isn't an equivalently empowered alternative) and so yes I will exercise my right to monitor and comment on content on the mainstream stations.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Street, Paul at Jan 03, 2005 05:55 AM
marcus denton is right by my observation. It''s been pretty highly covered in the mainstream and on television and whitney's article did a good job on key differences with Iraqi coverage. Anyway, my post was just a modest blog reflection about what I heard on a car radio on one night on one highway in the US Midwest. It did not pretend to break down overall US media coverage of the tsunami. Of course dominant media loves to go crazy with big events that have right nationalist resonance. Normal commercial media was taken over completely by 9/11 for what was it about a week. The most recent space shuttle tragedy in early 03 is a calmer example and so was last year's revolting nonstop commemoration of that memorable dirtbag Ronald Reagan.

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Person

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Cranch, James at Jan 03, 2005 04:02 AM
Well, I have to say, the British BBC news was surprisingly reasonable on this topic. I don't mean that they were good, just that they handled it better than any other recent international topic I've payed careful attention to their coverage of. They have devoted a large amount of time to it, and made careful hints that people need to donate money. On the other hand, they have been jingoistic (Finally! The troops arrive at last! Can't be bad, can it? Everyone loves troops!). They have been overemphasising our aid, relative to the magnitude of the problem (Aid is starting to arrive to some of the places that need it most! This is clearly a more important fact than that aid is still not arriving to most of the places that do.) But, credit where credit's due, I suppose. And it does seem a lot better than what Paul was complaining about.

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Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Child, Wandering at Jan 02, 2005 01:43 AM
Paul, yes sometimes these zealots think that you criticize how the Pro sports work because you don´t like sports at all and get surprised if you know about it. At least in the USA sport radio shows talk about these things (even if after they heard the wrong response try to end the disscusion); I´ve never heard something similar here.

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Person

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Brickshire2000, Memeinstlouis at Jan 01, 2005 23:43 PM
because it doesn't mean anything to our proto-fascist majority. our collective cognitive dissonance on matters of this kind is a symptom of the individualist culture, which has become what it is because of the right-wing, militant, capitalist filth that we have unconsciously absorbed through the mass media. we are talking generations of mental pollution. sports is a channel for aggression. agressive people support war. sports integrated the tragedy of 9/11 into their game time traditions. do you think you'll hear a thai or sri lankan national anthem, or even a moment of rememberance at any sports game? where is the incentive in that?

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Person

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Brickshire2000, Memeinstlouis at Jan 01, 2005 23:43 PM
is the lack of coverage of the NATURAL disaster really a surprise to anyone? any inkling that there may be something happening to the world's climate is not in the cards for the filter feeders of mass media. we're a nation that just re-elected the most dangerous man on the planet. how? why? our majority is these radio callers. rush limbaugh has the number one rated show in radio and if i believed in a devil i'd say he is him, or it. some of us are reeling with empathy, but there is no daily reminder via our radio and tv news. onlt a couple seconds every hour. the numbers rise, but we get no names. no touching stories of reuniting family members nor enraging stories of tragic death wholly uncalled for.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Street, Paul at Jan 01, 2005 23:25 PM
Wandering child, I once called a sports talk radio station on sports salaries versus human need. I was driving around and listening to this talk show host conduct a discussion on whether or not it mattered to listeners that ballplayers now make many millions of dollars..."does this influence your enjoyment of the games?" I dialed in and went on air to say yes it sort of does, actually (wrong answer). I went into a moderately eloquent discussion of how far one particular spoiled Chicago White Sox player's (Frank Thomas) salary would go in addressing poverty issues in specific Chicago neighborhoods. I was very matter of fact and concise and surprised the host by showing that I knew baseball statistics too. The host just cut me off and killed the topic altogether: he moved on to something much less threatening like who was best second baseman of all time.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Street, Paul at Jan 01, 2005 23:14 PM
Sorry, it was a mistake on my end...can't get it or another old post back. I agreed with joeblogs and I think also Hesed that social and political factors are relevant to the tsunami tragedy. For what its worth, the same discussion got started on Justin Poddur's excellent Killing Train blog (December 27th) and also there was a piece on the same topic by Chris Spannos. The main thing now in terms of what's "appropriate" (bwong's concern) is to donate if you can. Here are good avenues: www.oxfam.org.uk and www.unicef.org. Both have special donation links for the tsunami tragedy. On the intersection of social hiearchy and purely environmental factors in the creation of natural disasters, I suggest (for the more bibliographically inclined) the prolific work of Mike Davis, espcially his book Late Victorian Holocausts, which traces the interaction between late 19th century climate change and the savage racist imperial trade and social policies of the British Empire in the creation of mass famines in India and Africa during the 1870s and 1890s.

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Person

By Child, Wandering at Jan 01, 2005 22:39 PM
"Orwellian Powers" again?

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Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Hesed00, Hesed at Jan 01, 2005 21:44 PM
Paul, did one of your articles "disappear" from this site or did I just hallucinate it? Happy New Year!

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Person

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Jan 01, 2005 06:53 AM
On 2nd thought, this whole tsunami thing does perhaps show that America is the country that took Gordon Gecko of the movie "Wall Street" to heart when he said, "Greed is Good". THis is something that is an inherent hardwired aspect of all human and animal behavior, but we learn societal and cultural rules that make an exception for this greed instinct. In some respects, perhaps, America, our society, our culture, has perhaps been evolved and cultured and bred as a hyper-greed nation-culture. America is in some respects more like a livestock ranch than a human society. This is old stuff, going back centuries. So maybe Gecko was just stating the national unwritten Pledge of Allegiance. Maybe that explains why we are so stingy when it comes to giving to disaster.

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Person

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Jan 01, 2005 06:42 AM
hmm. That Kevorkian art URL did not come out. Let's try again: Kevorkian art

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Person

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Cryofan, Cryofan at Jan 01, 2005 06:40 AM
Paul, yes, we have some blind spots & hypocrisies, but aren't they are pretty much common to all humans, and not just an American thing? But I know how you feel when all around you are elephants standing in the corner of the room, ignored by everyone. There are even more egregious examples with respect to human hypocrisy when it comes to death and life span and how our time on earth shoudl be spent, and even when it comes to children & reproduction and how we seem to ignore death & greed & biological determinism and how we are slaves to our DNA & hardwiring. As a cryonicist, I stand outside society and wonder why 99.99 % of humanity seems to want to die, and yet seems to fail to acknowledge our short life spans at the same time. Well, a huge part of us seems to be hardwired to ignore so much of life. Maybe we could not serve our reproductive roles as best possible if we paid much attention to faraway disasters or gave much thought to ways of beating death. Dr Jack Kevorkian painted this picture that seems to illustrate some of the hypocrisy deeply ingrained in humanity.....

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Person

Re: Carlos Beltran v. the People of South Asia: Radio Reflections on American Compassion

By Child, Wandering at Jan 01, 2005 05:36 AM
I could not agree more with the article;to not call to the radio station was a good decision but I wonder what would happened if you had called to the Sports radio stations to talk about Beltran/Tsunami: In my opinion (I don´t know how this works in the US so I´m going to talk about my own experience) the professional sports/market is some kind of strange mix between business and social entertainment wich sometimes (increasingly) works like a pseudo-religion with really some zealots believers who avoid any rational discusion related to Paul´s points ("demagogue" is their favorite word), and the strange thing is that some of this zealots are, ironically, leftists. It seems that sport (professional) is untouchable: ( as an example the tsunami/Beltran or a top soccer player here in Europe)" oh, but clubs and players do a lot to support the "humanitarian cause" and they donate money so do not be so exaggerate" Paul, I wonder wich would be the hardest "match" the anti-UN radio stations or the pro-sports ones.

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