Soccer Bling and Life at the Bottom
American television viewers like their sports entertainment sanitized. Same with travel to Third World countries. The World Soccer Cup in Rio unfolds in a social atmosphere of clean, well-lighted places. The buildings are all new. The players are magazine cover-ready. Uniforms are colorful with impressive labels that will sell anywhere in the world. It’s a logo-dominated world, and business companies thrive.
Reality doesn’t matter. The poor are kept conveniently off camera, their neighborhoods bulldozed under as necessary. Soccer players are carefully selected to project GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly) images, defined by the online dictionary as “Used to describe a guy who is dressed nicely, very sleek, or very sexy to the ladies.” All televised events, from the Olympics to the Academy Awards, demonstrate an idealized version of life.
Psychiatrist Anthony Daniels has doctored to the poorest of the poor across the globe, including years ministering to the British underclass. In his Imprimis article “The Worldview that Makes the Underclass” Daniels reminds us once again that US poverty, though much cried about in elite social justice circles, isn’t poverty at all compared to the poor elsewhere:
Bear in mind that I had returned from some of the poorest countries in the world, where—in one case—a single hen’s egg represented luxury and the people wore the cast-off clothes of Europe that had been donated by charity. When I returned to England, I was naturally inclined to think of poverty in absolute rather than in relative terms—as people not having enough to eat, having to fetch water from three miles away, and so forth.
Daniels suggests that previous generations often were too proud to accept a lifestyle based on welfare dependency: “the notions of dependence and independence have changed. I remember a population that was terrified of falling into dependence on the state, because such dependence, apart from being unpleasant in itself, signified personal failure and humiliation. But there has been an astonishing gestalt switch in my lifetime.”
Terms have simply been brought up to date, he says: “When I started out as a doctor in the mid-1970s, those who received state benefits would say, ‘I receive my check on Friday.’ Now people who receive such benefits say, ‘I get paid on Friday.’” Even the word “dependence” has been reinvited:
Independence has now come to mean independence of the people to whom one is related and dependence on the state. Mothers would say to me that they were pleased to be independent, by which they meant independent of the fathers of their children—usually more than one—who in general were violent swine. Of course, the mothers knew them to be violent swine before they had children by them, but the question of whether a man would be a suitable father is no longer a question because there are no fathers: At best, though often also at worst, there are only stepfathers. The state would provide. In the new dispensation the state, as well as television, is father to the child.
While BBC treats the US television audience to a steady dose of Downton Abbey and other series which show a bucolic and nostalgic country life, the real poverty of the British people is kept out of sight, with family life about as dysfunctional as can be imagined:
I should mention a rather startling fact: By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home. The child may be father to the man, but the television is father to the child. Few homes were without televisions with screens as large as a cinema—sometimes more than one—and they were never turned off, so that I often felt I was examining someone in a cinema rather than in a house.
But what was curious was that these homes often had no means of cooking a meal, or any evidence of a meal ever having been cooked beyond the use of a microwave, and no place at which a meal could have been eaten in a family fashion. The pattern of eating in such households was a kind of foraging in the refrigerator, as and when the mood took, with the food to be consumed sitting in front of one of the giant television screens. Not surprisingly, the members of such households were often enormously fat.
