Neither am I suggesting that working class people don't attend sporting events - there are 2 rites of passage one must endure to sit at the grown-up table during holidays in my family - the first is to learn, intimately, cribbage and euchre, and the second is to be thoroughly familiar with green bay packer lore.
Neither am I suggesting that working class people generally resist the spectacle surrounding sports, nor that working class people aren't sometimes complicit in their own subjugation.
...just that sport is a little more complex, that it is experienced in ways that people had not yet addressed in this thread, and that people's reasons for enjoying sport may be more nuanced and rich than had been presumed.
I confess that I may be merely stamping my feet in defensiveness because I genuinely enjoy playing and, to an extent, watching sports and I don't want to think that by doing so I am being counterproductive to my political priorities. Maybe. But I truly think sport in general is far more neutral than we're conceptualizing it here, and can even have some rather emancipatory effects (see CLR James on cricket). Sport predates all production systems except (obviously) hunting and gathering, thus I find it difficult to neatly wrap it into the fabric of capitalism. Clearly the institutions that have developed to organize sports - whether NFL, NBA, specific teams (except the packers of course, owned as they are by the city of green bay ;] ) or YMCA - attempt to foster the consumption of specific commodities and ideas, but that is neither the athletes' (who sell their labor like you and me), fans', nor sports' fault. When I read the eagleton article it made me think that the line between game and sport was as blurry as that between critic and grumpy old man.
All of which makes me wonder whether the national anthem is played at professional golf tournaments. Hmm
On Jul 3, 2010 10:30 PM, "Dennis Perrin" <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
Joshua:
> I think we're overlooking a significant portion of people's experience
with
> sports - the conce...
Well, I doubt many are standing in their living rooms, but they're not
standing in stadiums? There's mass rejection of the National Anthem? If so,
I'm happy to be wrong.
There seem to be a lot of working class people going to games. Hit a Jets game, for instance, and see.
Dennis ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk