I Search for the NCAA Men's Final Four for Free, as in the "Old Days" and find no one standing up for "the public interest." And no games for free.
Neither the NCAA, the "Sports' Channels, the major "Free" networks nor the FCC seem to care. Our Politicians? I pose a challenge to at the end.
Update, Thursday, April 11, 2024 Here’s a report on where I am on my understanding of what’s happened to the tradition, if not the “right” of the average American and especially now poor American media consumers to view for free the major “rites of season passage” of our major sports culmination events. It’s a story, as I’m finding out, of the power of the electronic and broadcast networks - the declining but not totally eclipsed three old reliables, the TV networks of CBS, ABC, NBC and the relative newcomer Fox - the older cable TV franchises like Comcast, and the newer specialized sports networks like ESPN which now partners with Disney and two others, and the Turner Broadcasting Network to give us their TBS, TNT and True TV. I may not have all the constant evolution down entirely, but I think you get the idea. It was the old traditional big three whom I watched throughout my life for the NCAA playoffs, and not just the Final Four and the Championship game of Monday night fame, but I clearly remember watching Princeton and Bill Bradley play Providence College on the way to the final four in 1965, scoring 41 points. For free. No special subscriptions of any kind required. Kind of a citizen right hand in hand with the understandings of the public obligations of the broadcast media of the day. (With the American Right in revolt starting around if not before Reagan, with Goldwater’s supporters and Rick Perlstein’s tale in “Before the Storm.”
But much has changed in American capitalism since then as I indicted at the start here. I went to two articles after getting an Email back from Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Bachman, who had co-authored a story about the rise of woman’s college basketball and its media impacts on these markets with Isabella Simonetti. Ms. Bachman Emailed me that
As we wrote in the story, the NCAA negotiated different TV deals for each tournament. The men's deal was extended in 2016, a time when there were millions more cable-TV subscribers than there are now. That contract runs through 2032, and stipulates that the men's final be on TBS and CBS in alternating years.
And here’s the link to that excellent story, helping explain all the package deals, new coalitions, how many watched women’s vs men’s finals and the earlier tournament games, and something I didn’t know: that cable subscribers have been falling away from the industry over the past decade - down 25%: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/the-womens-ncaa-tournament-outshone-the-mens-but-it-got-99-less-tv-money-74806707?mod=basketball_news_article_pos2
What really caught my attention was the length of the men’s basketball contract for the NCAA tournament - 16 years - and the alternating year sequencing between a “broadcast” station, CBS, and a Turner cable one TBS. My personal situation was that my Comcast “contract” was bare bones on TV, with no sports channel, and even though CBS kind of steered viewers to test to see if your cable server authorized you to view TBS, of course my answer was no. How many other tens of thousands - was it possible millions - were thrust into the same situation? Does anyone know, or care, least of all a “public watchdog”?
I also did some further reading here with a contemporary story from Feb. 1, 2024 “What you need to know about U.S. Sports TV Contracts” by Anthony Crupi at Sportico which ran through the domination of NFL football as having 95 of the 100 highest rated viewer programs in 2023, with 2 for college football, one for politics and one for the Academy awards. That tells you where the billions in revenue come from for any of the broadcast/internet players, now being joined by Apple, Amazon and “the younger, TV-eschewing fan base.” This is also a good informative read: https://www.sportico.com/feature/sports-television-contracts-media-nfl-nba-ncaa-rights-1234764931/
And then to a much earlier, 2012 story at Foxsports: “NCAA Tourney no longer fee online for all.” https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-basketball/ncaa-tourney-no-longer-free-online-for-all - that introduced the 14 year contract between the NCAA and CBS/the Turner system (TBS, TNT, true TV) carrying the arrangements we’re under until next year, 2025.
All right fans and readers, now for the political analysis under Neoliberal late Capitalism and the fate of the electronic/digital commons - which is really the issue here - any provision for protecting what I - silly me - thought had become a national fan right to the climax biggest games - football, basketball, baseball, hockey, Olympics - from the “commons of the airwaves” whatever the electronic evolution of the different “broadcast” then “digital” forms.
I have yet to see my initial gut reaction discussed much less refuted, that something important for a “national sense” of belonging was disappearing into the pure economics of how many are watching and how/where, because there always seems to me to be the possibility of requiring, even in these 14-16 year contracts with the sports network conclomerates, that there be provision for the old free broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC and now Fox) to carry the games for all, and also for meeting the technological changes - free streaming for those on cable services even if the viewer’s basic package didn’t include these ever evolving new arrangement. Keeping up with what’s free and what cost’s via what memberships is becoming like a modern day “spin the wheel,” better check for each sport and event. Just who is “being served” under these arrangements?
Is that too much to ask? Yes of the current policeman-state absent wild frontier - no enforcement of any notion of the commons, and the national “morale” interest, much less the poorer folks nostalgia - but of course, first we would need any sense of a defensible commons, which we have lost in politics and public affairs as well with the response and answer being that all viewpoints are expressed somewhere in the electronic universe of the internet, maybe in the “ethernet,” the old broadcasters and the new cable conglomerates, even though no federal agency seems to have legal jurisdiction and as I’ve written in my long piece about the drift to American fascism, (World on Fire: Domestic Politics, Jan. 21, 2024) for decades Rush Limbaugh’s conservative views never got answered, much less refuted to his huge audience, in our value measuring world I guess, size of audience for contracts, like NFL football rights, and in the political spectrum, is the sole measure of the truth, if not the soul measure of it.
It takes me back to the reading experience of Stuart Jefferies “Grand Hotel Abyss,” (2016) which is a long historical review of the lives of dissident Frankfurt School from Germany’s Weimar Republic, their comfortable material lives allowing them the luxury of viewing the collapse of civilization in one of the West’s most advanced, educated countries, the Germany of 1919-1933. And the author feels, their relevance as well, after the Great Financial Crisis, 2008-2009, the Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011) and the challenge posed by Bernie Sanders in 2016-2020.
Well, they had some inherited material comforts from their businessmen fathers, but they still had to, by 1933, begin running for their lives as the Nazis took over. The Frankfurt School continued on first in the U.S. during the war, then in a return home to West Germany in the 1950’s, with Herbert Marcuse being a legend and bete noire of the American Right for his iconclastic books and political stances, and especially One Dimensional Man which appeared in 1964, suggesting that Western Capitalism had swallowed up all forms of significant dissent with its consumerism and practices, the book following in the wake of “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in 1944, by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkeimer, two of the other most famous names of the Frankfurt School (along with the sometimes in, sometimes out Erich Fromm) which saw the Western tradition falling under the sway of “instrumental reason.” That was the application of science and reason inside the specialized channels of the economy and the mass culture which emerged, but lacking any application of reason’s judgement on the resulting whole civilization - its inability to stop the rise of Nazism and the irrationality of Hitler’s racism and imperlialism in a country widely admired for its advanced educational system. Enlightenment’s mistakes had led to barbarism.
I can’t do justice to the school, or the Grand Hotel Abyss in this setting, this “update,” but let me just say that the developments here in the coverage of sports in the culture, on the verge of disappearing outside of paying media subscriptions, marks for me a continuation of some of the major observations if not themes of both the “school” and the book about it. And for younger readers, it’s hard to read them and not think of the Hunger Games and The Matrix. And, it seems to me, the rise of Trump flows right out of these concerns and failure of the public square to give enough time to debates where you have to defend your ideas in a long series of “dialectic” exchanges - a word which carries very heavy historical weight and baggage too, from the greatest Greek thinkers to proud late 18th and early 19th Century’s Germany’s own Hegel…and right on up to the Frankfurt School.
Let me close with a long paragraph from someone I turn to for clarifications to the obfuscations of our age, and previous ages, J.S. McClelland’s “A History of Western Political Thought,” from the sections on Socrates and Plato at the beginning of the work, and of Western Political thought, and from the Chapter importantly entilted “The Guardians of the State and Justice”:
Dialectic works through statement and contradiction. A position is stated by one speaker in the dialogue, and somebody else offers qualifications or objections. These qualifications or objections can be of two kinds: either they can hold that the originally stated position is unclear, perhaps because it contains contradictions, or objections can be raised to a stated position on the grounds that it is inadquate because it leaves something out. The original position is then restated by ridding itsef of its own contradictions and by taking into acount the objection that it was inadquate. The process is one which produces increasing coherence both in the sense of what is being proposed becoming internally more coherent as the contradictions are ironed out and in the the sense that it incorporates what seems sensible from the criticisms which are offered aginst it. It is easy to see that this is ideally how ordinary argument should proceed. It is essentially co-operative despite the dialectical form the argument takes.
Is it going too far (yes, probably) to say that the process ends with a rational case for justice in the matter at hand…and if you get to the concluding sections of the Grand Hotel Abyss that will sound familiar in the hands of the inheritor of the Frankfurt School, Jurgen Habermas, as he argues for the necessity of the process in the public square, in trouble in the 1990’s already.
Of course, the evolution of this tradition by the time we get from the Greeks, Hegel and yes, Marx to the Frankfurt school - gets quite a bit more complex with the school’s “negative dialectics” as the task of criticizing the modern techno-rational capitalist state and its state of democracy and its all encompassing mass media including domination of, very arguably, the arts, high, middle and low brow - requires some mental effort well beyond the sketch here by McClelland.
But let me say this nonetheless: our current “debates,” the vast majority that appear in the major media, do not take even this rather obvious form, neither right wing talk radio, our major party clashes, with only the old “Firing Line” and episodic and non-mainstream debates you can find with some effort on YouTube beginning to meet even the basic outlines - almost the common sense method sketched out in this quoted paragraph.
And certainly, in the matter I began with: who represents the general public interest, the poor, the old traditions of major events free to all - no one apparently, there is no state or public watch dog guardian, the private sector, all hail THE MARKET, has taken a near absolute form - unless you believe everyone’s right have been represented by their registering in the silent passive polls of who watches what and when.
To me, in this sense of the Frankfurt School, “instrumental reason” in the form of “rationality” applied by each of the market players, but not consciously by the public itself or any guardian for it, has come to dominate, and therefore choice has become entirely a question of “dollar democracy” in the free market, with the free market itself dominated by larger and larger conglomerates - the new alliances being their own remedy to greater and greater fragmentation.
Therefore: I conclude something profound is missing.
Update, Tuesday, April 9, 2024: I posted the following at “The Athletic” Comments in the NY Times and copied it because I doubt they will publish it, the topic seemingly banned or ruled “sentimental.” Who knows.
“Thank you very much for this “coverage,” because of a change in the heart of America this year, for the first time since I could remember, since 1959, basketball fans could not watch a free network version of the massively promoted and hyped conclusion to "March Madness." I seem to be the only writer objecting in principle to the NCAA awarding the rights to the game (and the Final Four, by the way) to a dedicated sports channel where one has to subscribe to watch the last three games, shutting out the major "free" networks." You may not think it is a big deal but it is. I invite Times readers to read what no one else has written: https://williamrneil.substack.com/p/i-search-for-the-ncaa-mens-final
It seems to me its a violation of a public interest right, in a nation where all such citizen rights have been replaced by pay to play - and watch. It's sickening and I protest. Unsurprisingly no politician has commented on where and when the contracts were signed most likely with no regulatory agency involved as I understand the legal issues. This is all ok with the NCAA who always advertises the other activities of its athletes and the vast good their college institutions do. I guess they don't have history and political science departments anymore, or gobbled up by business and finance majors - and STEM students.
Shame on the Times, the WSJ and on and on.”
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Please pardon my civic and legal naivete, and maybe I’m confusing what I thought was a long standing tradition with a shocking proclamation of a “Right,” but I couldn’t find any free broadcast last night of the NCAA men’s Final Four games. Basketball, of course. And heading into tonight’s men’s final, I still don’t see a free national option.
A little background, if not context, Context having become a “fraught” word. First, I was a point guard in high school, 1967, sometimes starting in my junior year under coach Emil Wandishin at Ewing High. Ewing was a suburb of Trenton, NJ, and Trenton had been a basketball hotbed, along with a good part of urban NJ, for some time, as the Hurley family of Jersey City will testify too, a son being the coach of the University of Connecticut reigning national champs and heading into tomorrow night’s men’s final game - and I still cannot find a clear answer as to whether anyone without a sports channel subscription will be able to watch for that game for free. Try Googling yourself and see how teasingly the promises seem to disappear into the subject matter I’m about to cover.
Growing up, I was on the basketball playgrounds since the age of 9, and a ritual matching Easter itself (I played in the Catholic Youth Organization league from the age of 9) and March’s Spring was always a special time of my own playoffs and the college men whom I followed closely - Big Five in Phillie, ACC, Big Ten, no Big East until much later. It was in “Eastertide” that the first warm and sunshine filled outdoor games, with real sweat and mild sunburns reminded me of something pagan about the rituals. I can’t remember anytime in the subsequent 64 years (I’m 73) when I could not watch the Final Four or traditional Monday night championship game on a free network. I remember fondly and passionately cheering for Texas Western’s all black starting team in 1966 against all white “big time” University of Kentucky, another whole chapter in itself of the history of black Americans’ Civil Rights. If you missed the movie of the drama, “Glory Road,” (2006) it’s a pretty good imitation of what I remember of the reality, in a league with “Hoosiers.” Maybe someone in the press can ask Trump if he’s ever seen “Glory Road.”
When I was a young man working to build my 5’ 9 1/2” skills everyday on the playground courts, I could name, and still can, the starting line-ups from the Trenton High School Champions of 1961 including George Lee and someone who starred at the University of Illinois, Tal Brody, who played with a gold Star of David around his neck, had the last of the two hand set shots to go along with a good jumper and quick drives, who later became “Mr. Basketball” in Israel, introducing the sport to a young land where it gradually took hold. That land is much older and seemingly less idealistic now. George Lee was 6’ 4” and about 230 lbs and the best way to imagine him was to think of an early Charles Barkley. Lee was a great leaper and power player around the rim, with a good corner jump shot.
Trenton Catholic High, Notre Dame High, I can still name the stars and starters from the 1959-1961 era, including Jack Cryan, Nick Workman (the nation’s leading college scorer later and my boyhood basketball hero who was an All-American at Seton Hall, the last of the 6’ 3” centers.) And Ken “Moose” Sokolowski, the 6’ 6” center, 220 lbs of the great Trenton Catholic teams. Tony Gennari and George Shary were great shooters who went on to have stellar collegiate careers. And the best of the Catholic teams went to the ESCIT (Eastern States Catholic Invitational Tournament) in then seemingly exotic Newport, Rhode Island, after the NJ state tourneys were over. (I wonder if they got to do the Oceanside Mansion walk after the games?) In that tourney I remember hearing of the famous DC teams of DeMatha High under John Wooten, whose name still lives on in basketball camps named in his honor, for kids all over the East. And Archbishop Carrol High, another DC rival for the Trenton area’s best teams, where I first heard the name of 6’ 10” Tom Hoover and some obscure guy also 6’ 10” named John Thompson. They were giants in my young imagination as well at the biggest high school centers I had ever heard of.
Just a little background to help you appreciate my shock when I set time aside last night, Saturday, April 6th, 2024 after six pm and 9:30 pm to watch two games I had more than passing interest in. Especially for Purdue and U Conn and their centers. Then I found out that my $182 per month “cheapee” Comcast contract (Xfinity) which included no sports channels like the famous ones, ESPN, TBS, and so forth - was a basic bare bones TV portion to go with high speed cable - History Channel, CNN, AMC and not much else, denied me any linkage to the teasing of “Watch Online for Free” - why? Because of my Comcast sans sports channels.
I thought there had to be a mistake. No public free Final Four? This was now the America sports nation I had grown up in? How is this possible?
And checking today, Sunday, April 7th I’m not sure despite the ABC claim for the Championship game that the same outage for me will apply and many millions of others. I hope I’m wrong.
Here’s a sample I found at CBS of the teasing quality of how to watch…but when you reach the conclusions, it’s all part of a pay-for “package”:
“How to watch the men's Final Four games without cable
If you've given up your cable subscription, or your cable provider doesn't include the channels carrying March Madness this year, you can subscribe to one of the streaming or live TV platforms featured below.
Hulu + Live TV/ESPN+ bundle: The one way to stream every March Madness game”
You can watch March Madness 2024, including both the men's and women's Final Four and championship games, with the Hulu + Live TV/ESPN+ bundle. The bundle features 95 channels, including CBS, ESPN, TNT, TBS, ABC and TruTV, and includes the ESPN+ streaming service, so you'll be able to watch every game of both tournaments. The women's Final Four will be broadcast live on ESPN+. Unlimited DVR storage is also included. Watch every March Madness game on every network this season with Hulu + Live TV/ESPN+ bundle.
But I’m going to close now with my four or five published comments at the Wall Street Journal sports section, where I penned them, outraged, last night to a poor reporter’s mundane coverage of the Purdue pursuit over the years. (I took advantage of the Journal’s $1 per week election year offer and for ideological “balance.” You’ll get the drift. I don’t feel like apologizing for calling the NCAA, the sports networks, the major free channels who don’t require subscriptions or Comcast “greedy bastards.”
Here’s the article where I commented: https://www.wsj.com/sports/basketball/purdue-final-four-march-madness-zach-edey-ba9dbacb?mod=sports_lead_pos3
Perhaps the reporters could explain the economic negotiations between - I assume - the NCAA and the sports networks and major national networks who deprived non-subscriber basketball fans access to the Final Four semis and Nat. Champ. game on Monday. Who had the greater greed, college basketball adm or the networks, specialized and national?
A real retro-grade development, bad for citizens and have a good laugh at this: national unity.
I just spun my Comcast TV dial: I saw a professional us soccer match, the new Spring football league and I think an international soccer match but no college basketball. Maybe next year they can broadcast the shirts vs skins scrimmages the first week of practice; apparently that 's what the 'poor' public gets and deserves.
Is the Journal going to be silent about this as long as someone is making a lot of money?
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Well I think the patterns of contemporary capitalism denied me and millions of Americans of the chance to view even the final four NCAA games unless we also subscribe to a sports channel. Even though I pay $182 per month for rip off Comcast, I get no sports channels and only CNN, History Channel and AMC as anchors. I get high speed Internet, but the TV package is bare bones, all I can afford in retirement. Tonight I checked online to see if there was free streaming there but no, TBS and others have captured it all for profit: so much for any sense of national unity - it's instead dollar democracy for the affluent. When I was a boy growing up in NJ in the 1950's we had the commercial channels of the day - free Phillies, Eagles, Yanks, Giants, '76ers, Nets, and later the Jets.
I guess we're sure making progress as a nation with even a pretense of unity. Long live pure capitalism and its bought dollar democracy!
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I'm wondering if there is the basis of a class action suit against the NCAA and or the networks who negotiated the deal which shut the poorer public off their rights to a traditional free final four and championship game that has existed for so many years even through the rise of the pay for sports networks you mention.
Who was at the table, and when, these deals were drawn up - 1,2,3 years in advance and who represented the public interest in at least two rounds of generally broadcast games? Where were the regulatory agencies and how did they dodge the issues I'm raising.
I'll talk to myself: "Bill, you're in the wrong age, it "all capitalism all the time now," the Frankfurt School knew that very well when they checked in at the Hotel Abyss. Get over it and get a job, even at 73. Then you buy your ticket and all is well in free market heaven."
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18 hours ago
Sorry I left out the NY Knicks, Channel 9...playoff games too but they were usually on the major channels, not the local ones.
Yes we put up with a lot of beer commercials in the 1950’s and 1960’s which are better than today’s singing “one pill changed my life” and “Bayeuth festival capital funding operas.” And Medicare Advantage propaganda.
And politicians wonder why voters are fed up: because politicians have turned all of life, ala the Frankfurt School's fears, over to commerce. Free to choose indeed!
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And I follow basketball pretty closely, appreciate the progress at Purdue especially their revitalized guard play and looking forward to the match up of two great centers, Purdue vs U Conn. Unfortunately - is this actually possible? - please, some sharp reader tell me I missed something - it looks like the pay for view stations have even the NCAA Championship game locked up and away for those of us who can't afford sports packages.
Comcast has enough money to buy all its customers at least streaming from the oligopoly they deal with all the time - for the Final Four and National Championship Game.
Forgive me Comcast if I'm not impressed with your sense of national citizenship. No entitlement to national sports climax games unless you can pay.
Let me count the ways unregulated capitalism is helping, not alone, but leading the way in destroyimg our nation. Bring back Red Barber, Mel Allen, Whitey Asburn and Phil Rizzuto. Whom I did't have to pay to hear...
Only football qualifies?
Ok, I guess you can conclude I’m pissed off and I think rightly so, historically, culturally and for the good old All American sports fan ethic.
Our DMV region of Maryland - don’t blame me for the confusion with motor vehicle agencies - is AKA as the Beltway, and must have the world’s highest density of lawyers.
So please, if you are one and read my blog here, tell me that my research in digging about the regulatory possibilities if not “class action suits” are nil in chances because the FCC does not regulate for the questions I’m raising, and has no power over the cable networks, little over the traditional commercial channels of Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS…and let’s close with a little joke here.
I trust Republicans would tell me “get over it Bill” you’re living in a fog of nostalgia for the old New Deal Days, get a job at 73 on the concrete floors of Home Depot and you’ll be able to afford a “better” Comcast package with maybe a sports channel.
I trust Democrats to say they too have faith in the barely regulated markets, and that my pleas and arguments here went out with Coach Wooten and more tightly, Ralph Nader.
I’ll close on a high brow academic note directed to the scholar of Maryland, and the Congress, Rep. Jamie Raskin. Congressman, didn’t you refer in one of your very recent writings, to the famous European and later American scholar, Hannah Arendt, in her apogee work of 1950-51, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”? I read the whole, difficult but fascinating work in 2021, when I “downsized” my library and my living quarters, protesting all the way, but found her important chapter called “The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie” to be worth reading again - I’m now on my fourth.
She has one of the most complex sentence structures styles I’ve ever encountered, but they are worth struggling through and savoring. Here’s my question: how did an author who traced the character of this “middle class” the polite sociological term for the more charged “bourgeoisie” (bourgeois being a common name in France by the way) put such a heavy burden on its shift of focus from accumulation to produce via industrial inventions and utilities to accumulation for accumulation of power’s sake, leading, after the economic crises of the 1860’s and 1870’s to the grand vistas of Imperialism, in Africa, the Middle East, everywhere the worried investors turned for more “primitive” pre-capitalists peoples to further fuel the stalled and worrisome “old” economies of Western Europre?
How did the champion of the Free World in the Cold War, and rightly so after the Nazis and facing Stalin’s Russia, end up drawing upon, in the order I encounter them - and she wrote about in this chapter: Thomas Hobbes (not John Locke!) an amazing American writer from 1945 - Robert Livingston Schuyler (“The Fall of the Old Colonial System” (two old colonial names one of whom I went to high school with, RIP Betty Schuyler), Cecil Rhodes star gazing at the worlds he can’t conquer, J.A. Hobson’s “Imperialism” (1905) - a lasting classic and standard of scholarship; Marx himself on the origins of “primative accumulation”; Rosa Luxemburg’s “brilliant insights,” ; Rudolf Hilferding; V.I. Lenin himself and we all know the classic work on the big “I” …well, enough.
“Mein Kampf” itself is infused with racism and expansionism to the only place Germany can rightly place itself in the world, in “his” opinion, pushing to the East, getting those Jews and Slavs out of the way with their inferior ways and claims to life under the Darwinian Sun….and on and on…
This was the writer Arendt who moderated after moving to America and experiencing - to condense many works and commentaries into this: she saw she had overblown the tracings in this chapter on the European bourgeoisie’s faults leading to the barbarisms of Germany and Russia whose late 19th and early 20th century politics could not cope with the strains of capitalism and the antagonisms between the newly arrived middle class, the rising and insistent working class (helping mightily to eat into the ease of previous accumulation decades with their insistent demand to live like human beings), and the remains everywhere of the old landed aristocracy. No, in America, the middle class was so large, not so greedy and not so driven into Imperialism, that despite a little bump in the road called the Great Depression, we were well on our way by 1941 to the American Century - and of course, my birth at the very middle of the century.
My question to Rep. Raskin, and Senator Cardin, and candidates Trone and Hogan: did Hannah Arendt not still have a good part of the truth by the tale in this chapter in 1951…that focuses on Hobbes as the true philosopher of the middle class, which is where, by the way, Fintan O’Toole ended up in his brilliant and insightful online essay about “An Epic for our Time” - the Hobbesian tale of Game of Thrones, here:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/fintan-o-toole-game-of-thrones-is-an-epic-for-our-times-1.3835156 published on March 30, 2019 in the Irish Times.
In a sense, by my little troubles with the Final Four and re-reading the original intent of Ms. Arendt’s famous work, brings me right up against Mr. Larry Summers, Mr. Paul Krugman, Mr. Bill Clinton, Mr. Barack Obama, and the optimistic bromides of President Joe Biden who is both a capitalist and a champion of our “workers.” That combination will hold up not too far into O’Toole’s long sketches about “Joe” in the New York Review of Books. Two of them.
And maybe some of you will make this connection, to at least the historical emotion, if not the actual events referred to:
Enough for now.
Best to all my readers, and good luck to us all.
William R. Neil
Frostburg, MD
I decided that maybe the setting and the tone of the "Flower of Scotland" fits the situation of an old tradition traduced by the decade by decade onslaught of the money economy to an extent that maybe we've never seen...although Fitzgerald in the Great Gatsby sketched out the feel of the 1920's pretty well didn't he "ole sport"? It's another way of getting at the complexities, and the ferocity of that chapter I quoted from seemingly forgotten in the great work of Hannah Arendt, her intensity against the relentless drive of the bourgeoisie of the late Victorian era in the spirit of Imperialism in the 1880's and 1890's. Maybe I didn't make it clear how tough she was: From page 144 in this stunning chapter entitled "Imperialism: The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie" (in the overseas ventures they were free from the laws and restrainst of the home countries of Britain, France, Germany and dare we say Leopold in Beligium? :
"In the Imperialistic epoch a philsophy of power became the philosophy of the elite, who quickly discoverd and were quite ready to admit that the thrist for power could be quenched only through destruction. This was the essential cause of their nihilism (esp. conspicuous in France at the turn, and in Germany in the twenties, of this century) which replaced the superstition of progress with the equally vugar superstittion of doom, and preached automatic annihilation with same enthusiasm that the fanatics of automatic progress had preached the irresistibility of economic laws. It had taken Hobbes, the great idolator of success, three centuries to succeed...Every man and every thought which does not serve and does not conform to the ultimate purpose of a machine whose only purpose is the generation and accumulatin of power is a dangerous nuisance."
I doubt that this passage or much of this chapter was every read aloud in the American college classrooms of the Cold War. And they probably couldnt be read today with the donors and Trustees launching the type of purges we have recently seen at Harvard and Wharton.
Bill - As a fellow old man former jock, I hear you.
But are you seriously paying $182 a month? Or was that a typo? Or annual?
Every year for the ECAC and NCAA hockey tournaments, to watch Cornell Big Red, I sign up for basic ESPN ($10 per month) and then cancel it after the Frozen Four. If I time it right, I get away with just one month.
I just checked and I can watch tomorrow's B-Ball final - get an ESPN account!