The Mitchell Report: Follow the Money

Bear with me on what might appear to be a tangent from my usual monastic concerns. I promise that I will get to the relevance as quickly as I can. Also bear in mind that I was a sports enthusiast as a young man, to the point where I managed to get a press pass by becoming a sports announcer on a Green Bay radio station.

Yesterday, the "Mitchell Report" on steroid use in baseball was released, naming over 80 players, some superstars. It is a sad story all around and probably will get worse.

In today's Chicago Tribune, most of the reporters responded with outrage, which I understand. However, I think that it is misplaced. I would like to suggest that we as a society are all implicated by this scandal, and here is why.

When faced with the prospect of making 5-25 million dollars a year playing a game versus getting a real job like being an auto mechanic or insurance salesman, is it any surprise that some men would choose to bend the rules in their favor? When a megastar like pitcher Roger Clemens loses a step and is fading into irrelevance, can we really be surprised and outraged when he allegedly decides to rescue and prolong his career by doing what countless other men around him are doing?

I will not comment on the motive of glory and fame for now, and focus simply on the money. Major League Baseball players are automatic millionaires these days. A guy barely good enough to make a roster is almost assured of seven figures. That is a whole lot of money, enough to set a clever investor for a long time. And they make it every year. Who of us wouldn't be enticed?

This raises the question: all this money for what? Where does this money come from? Most of us would bark out the answer, "Ticket prices inflated by those greedy owners," and this answer would be incorrect. The huge revenues actually come largely from television contracts.

But where does television money come from? Here is the link that is almost never talked about in our world. One would think that the omnipresence of television would spawn more intelligent commentary about the meaning of the phenomenon itself. Instead, what passes for intelligent analysis are stories about how many episodes of Gunsmoke are out on DVD and who will win Dancing With the Stars. The very important question, "Why watch television at all?" is almost never asked, except when people encounter monks who dont' have one.

The fact is that millions of people take television for granted. And if the stakes are high for baseball, how much higher are they for television in general. I forget exactly how much money a Super Bowl ad costs these days, but it's not the $18 my old radio station used to charge for a thirty-second spot (and we were FM!).

Advertisers are willing to fork out this money because...advertising works. I must admit that this is one of the single biggest mysteries for me in the modern world. Why we should be swayed by self-interested promoters of products baffles me. The documented effectiveness of advertising suggests that the larger part of Americans are perfectly willing to turn off their God-given faculties of critical judgment, even when their own money is at stake. How many people buy more expensive brand name things simply because they are brand name? I will admit that Pepsi and Coke taste different, but why should the sales of one or the other change because of advertising? Are people's taste preferences really altered by, say, images of women on the beach?

Well, yes, apparently. And here we arrive at the crux of my long-winded argument. Advertising works, it seems to me, because television really does disable our rational ability to discern the movements of our passions (there is the monastic connection). Advertising stokes the fires of our passions (lust, gluttony and vainglory are probably the most typical) in order to override our reason. The subjection of reason to the passions is one of the effects of sin. It is not reasonable to spend our money on products simply because advertisers appeal to our vanity and we feel that we will be 'cool' or 'the first on our block' to own a pet rock. But we do this. If we didn't, then advertisers would not seek out television. Television would have less money to give to baseball owners, and baseball owners less money to dangle in front of players tempted by steroids.

It is possible that revenues might be just as high if sporting events were all pay-per-view. In this case, it would be our worship of sports figures that would be to blame, and indeed this is not absent as a problem in the previous scenario. What all of this suggests to me is that sports fans in some measure and television viewers in some smaller measure, have colluded with major league sports to contribute to the steroids scandal.and that we turn a blind eye to the connections because we like having our passions stoked. If this is the case, then there is a much larger sickness to this whole story, and it implicates a whole culture. Outrage is out of place when it is coming from individuals and aimed at the men who have been tempted beyond their strength--by our money.

The Economics of Vocations

I apologize for the pause in postings again. My father is recovering from a rather serious illness, and I was with him at the hospital a couple of times last week.

I received a phone call from an old friend of the community yesterday. He mentioned to me that he recently began serving the Laboure Society, a group dedicated to assisting those who would like to discern a calling to religious life or the priesthood, but are saddled with prohibitive educational debt. Kudos to those serving this worthy cause!

Religious communities love to welcome persons with good educations, of course, but in recent decades the risk is precisely that someone will join, get huge debts paid off by the community, then leave for a career. While this is a sad and too-often repeated scenario, the dynamic is perfectly understandable. Someone leaving college with a debt of $40,000 or grad school with a debt of $80,000+ is in a bind. If the degree is in the humanities especially, one can hardly find a job for which one is qualified that will pay back the debt in any reasonable time. On the other hand, humanities degrees are attractive for religious communities, and many in the humanities are drawn to community life and service by dint of their professional interest and training. While it is tempting to point fingers at those who apparently abuse the system and get religious communities to pay off the debt, we should be aware that there is a huge temptation to 'discern' a religious calling when one is in the bind described above. Someone with a Masters in English, for example, can take a job at a bank and earn real money or wallow in academia or teach in primary school. Either way, you have to fork over $250-$400 a month (or more) to the government or private agency that financed the loan. This kind of burden must be a factor in any life decision at that point: who wouldn't think of throwing it all on God? And who wouldn't have second thoughts once the albatross of debt starts to fade into the receding horizon of the past?

Behind this all is a bit of a conspiracy theory I have held for some time. The astonishing rise in the cost of a college education is often explained by rising costs of endowments and what not. Well, maybe so. On the other hand, the government is happy to toss out loans with more-or-less guaranteed returns in interest over many years. So colleges have a certain freedom to increase tuition, figuring that the government will float the cash and then force young graduates to enter the rat race of debt relief by assuming the patriotic duty (as articulated from the demand side by President Bush) of frantic production to keep the American machine lubricated. I haven't seen anyone tie this reality into the dearth of religious vocations, but surely this is a huge factor.

I was very blessed to have gone to school on a scholarship that paid almost the entirety of tuition, room and board. This left me free to pursue first the artistic life of a gigging musician and composer, then the poverty of religious life. Most 23-year-olds today do not have this option. It is any wonder that music is rotten and vocations are down?

Reflections on Mexico, Conclusion

Perhaps before I conclude, I should distance what I am discussing from the current immigration debates. Are Mexicans exploiting America? or vice versa? Well, exploitation is the act of taking unjust advantage of another's weakness. Surely this is a danger in any relationship since human beings and their communities always have weaknesses. If Mexican immigrants are exploiting our porous borders and good employment opportunities it must be because of some weakness in our system. I will end this preface simply by noting that it is the deep weakness of a fundamental lack of culture that is possibly to blame for our unwillingness to govern ourselves in a manner that avoids these problems. On the flip side, it is precisely the strength of Mexican culture that allows for Mexicans to take the risk of leaving family in order to come north to earn money, etc. In short, there is an ecomonic imbalance that favors the U.S. and a cultural imbalance that favors Mexico. Could we instead support each other by offering our strengths?

My thoughts on culture began with visits to the many local churches, visits I described in the first of these posts. But they came to a head at Sunday Mass. Whatever liturgical angst we have in the U.S. Catholic Church is totally foreign to the jubilant celebration of the Eucharist at La Soledad. I began to wonder if the liturgical wars still burning here have less to do with the scheming of the Liturgical Soviet (as I fondly call those who monkey with forms for the sake of "The People") or with the nervous reactions of the Romish bureuacrats, and more to do with the lack of anything like a clear American culture, into which the reforms of Vatican II could be fitted seamlessly, as seems to be the case in Mexico.

Now there are obviously other factors. Spanish is much closer to Latin than English is, and so the change to the vernacular would hardly have created the difficulties it has with a non-Romance language. But for a clear example of my thought, let's take 'folk music'. In Mexico, people were clearly singing identifiably Mexican idiom tunes with guitars, maracas, and so on. By contrast, when 'folk Masses' came about in the States in the 70's, what was the American idiom of folk music? Woody Guthrie? Stephen Foster? Gordon Lightfoot? The Beach Boys? Depending on whether you were Carey Landry, Richard Proulx, Suzanne Toolan, or the Damiens, you'd answer differently. And not one of these styles reflects the actual 'folk music' I grew up with: German waltzes and polkas and hymns on my mother's side, and Polish polkas on my father's side. I hated going to Mass at home with my grandparents and having to anguish over the guitar youth cheerfully insisting that my immigrant grandparents give up their beloved Mainz hymnody for Godspell.

Some would argue that American culture is precisely this crazy amalgam of local cultures combining to form something greater. I would call it rather a confused artistic vacuum, into which top-down, 'expert' solutions easily make their way, either from the Liturgical Soviet or the Vatican. This is only an example from music; analogous problems abound in areas of architecture, lay participation and devotions. What to do?

I mentioned that there is need of an American Catholic culture, and I received at least one ironic comment on the topic. Yes, cultures do not spring up overnight. They are not planned. No one makes a decision that 'in our culture, we are going to do things this way'. Rather, people make countless transactions with reality (to paraphrase Fr Aidan Kavanaugh, OSB) and through these negotiations, customs and languages arise that begin to shape a distinctive culture.

Don't we already do this in America? Yes, but with one fundamental aspect missing: that missing aspect? Stability. Because we are constantly dealing with different people, our language must be the abstract esperanto of legal and financial institutions, or the bromides that 'personalize' these abstract transactions ("My name is Jenn and I will be your waitress tonight!" "Have a nice day!")

For a culture to grow, there must be continuity, not only in customs, but in persons. First and foremost this means families. My father is always and forever my father, and the stability of our relationship gives stability and shape to my life and by extension to all my relationships. Unless, of course, I have no real relationship with my father, which happens to be the case for one of every two Americans, more or less. Same thing with mothers, grandmothers, and so on. Another stabilizing force in families is larger numbers of children. A big family grows exponentially over three generations, and involves everyone in it in clear social bonds that knit the community together. All these grandchildren need to marry outside the family, and so this one large family become a meeting place for large numbers of persons outside the family, and the whole community again becomes interwoven.

As is well-known, our ersatz culture corrodes these family bonds in many ways. The smiling, guitar-strumming Godspell teen choir might have meant well, but they were, perhaps unknowingly, putting me in a position to forsake the values and culture of my own family history (Bavarian) in favor of the celebrity values of Steven Schwartz and (R) "Gather Comprehensive." Of course, political human engineering, such as the striking down of anti-abortion legislation, the hiking up of the drinking age (what 20-year-old German/Pole doesn't drink beer, for heaven's sake?), public schooling that force-teaches human sexuality and evolution where parents don't want it, and the drumming up of wars whose aims bear little relationship to the everyday concerns of normal inhabitants of the struggling local cultures of places like Dubuque, Iowa or Tuscaloosa, Alabama--these maneuvers are great for the economy and international swagger of the USA, but they make family life and stability very difficult and costly. Deciding for stability in many cases is deciding for second-class status. Driving the American economy requires ambitious, upwardly mobile types to be encouraged to shake free of culture. Many people today are so conditioned by our consumerist 'culture' and the promise of total satisfaction of desire, that to sit in one place and be less productive, to have to deal with the same persons all the time, is simply intolerable. This phenomenon goes by many names, individualism being one that springs to mind.

What to do? This sort of crisis is by no means new in human history. A similar decay of culture took place with the slow fade of the Roman empire. Monasteries helped to refound culture in Europe by becoming places of stability. But all of us, even outside the monastery, can make some contribution. For starters, we should encourage families to stay together and each of us can make the effort to be a little closer to our own families. This also means accustoming ourselves to what seem like the unpleasant realities of committing to a parish, a set group of persons in a stable environment. It is tempting to shop around for a parish, but this impulse assists in the reduction of church life to yet another consumer choice, rather than the humble but privileged place of my encounter with the mystery of the Incarnation. Jesus spent almost his whole earthly life in Nazareth, travelling around the relatively small area of Galilee after thirty years at home, and then finally going up to Jerusalem to die.

There are many other related projects here, and to consider them would take us too far afield. I mention the question of family and stability because these attributes are clearly on display in places like Atotonilco, Guanajuato, Mexico. Families are large; five children seems to be about a minimum (I saw no evidence whatsoever of a mass exodus of persons to the States--there are plenty of people coming up to replce those who have emigrated). Plus, families have lived in the same group of villages possibly for centuries, even predating the Spanish conquest. There is no GIA to send out brochures telling the local organist which hymns are 'in' this year.

The Anti-Catholic government that ruled for most of the 20th century in Mexico tried to stamp out the Church, but they couldn't stamp out local cultures. Because of this the Church survived even official persecution. There has been no official effort to weaken the Catholic Church in our country, but culture is so weak that the Church suffers a great deal more here without official persecution.

I'm sure that many of these ideas, being well beyond my personal competence, will strike some readers as missing on certain details and realities. But I stand behind the general thrust. What we have to learn from Mexico is how to be a culture: how persons with ties of geography and blood can and should stand together and oppose efforts of homogenizing government-types to break us loose from our places in order to fit us into the giant consumer scheme that turns the cranks for the American machine. So I close with one final exhortation to anyone who thinks that there is any merit to what I have just written, and I promise to go back to the Rule after this. My exhortation: If you want to participate in the rebuilding of a real culture, take the first logical step of turning off your television. Take the time you save to talk to your kids, your parents or your neighbors. Cancel your subscription to Newsweek and take the time and money you save to plant some flowers and say hi to the people who walk by as you weed around them. End of sermon.

Glory be to God in Jesus Christ!

Christmas in November

Well, the Christmas decorations are up here in Bridgeport and the radio is already playing Christmas (Holiday?) songs. Actually, I saw Christmas items in a store back in September. I am making a great effort not to be a naif about this, but heavens! when will we as Christians find a way to say, "enough" to the commercialization of our Holy Day? I don't really know what one is supposed to do specifically; in the monastery, we have the advantage of being almost entirely isolated. We are bound to celebrate the liturgical days according to the Church's traditional calendar. So we don't even put up a tree until December 23.

Then again, we also don't give gifts. This makes it pretty easy on us, I admit, and I am certainly not condemning gift-giving. But are there things we can do to return to a more liturgical celebration of Christmas? A more spiritual celebration?

I grew up in a poor family, and we had a $5 limit per gift per person. That meant that we made most of our gifts for each other. How memorable they were! We still talk about them, and we still make things for each other.

Again, I understand that there is tremendous pressure to buy expensive things for loved ones, especially children who face scorn in school if they don't have the newest gadget (that agony wasn't all that long ago for me, though a fancy gadget in my day was...a CD player!--I held out for vinyl well into college). But where (and how) do we put our foot down? I am not asking this rhetorically: does anybody have any suggestions?