Super Bowl, Collective Effervesence, Media Events and Empire: A Collection of Themes

[Ed Jewett]

Why Our National Superbowl TV Party Has Become the Last Supper for the US Empire


Never before have so many loose strands of an unraveling empire come together in a single event accessible to those who mourn or cheer America.



Tomdispatch.com / By Robert Lipsyte

http://www.alternet.org/culture/149803/w...us_empire/

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I read the above from within the filter of Emile Durkheim's works on the collective effervesence of the event itself, and within the filter of Elihu Katz' work on media events.

"Collective effervescence (CE) is a perceived energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, a rave, or a riot. This perception can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life.

Collective effervescence is the basis for Émile Durkheim's theory of religion as laid out in his 1912 volume Elementary Forms of Religious Life. This book is largely based on studies of Australian aborigines. Durkheim was concerned primarily with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era.

Durkheim argues that the universal religious dichotomy of profane and sacred results from the lives of these tribe members: most of their life is spent performing menial tasks such as hunting and gathering. These tasks are profane. The rare occasions on which the entire tribe gathers together becomes sacred, and the high energy level associated with these events gets directed onto physical objects or people which then become sacred. The force is thus associated with the totem which is the symbol of the clan, mentioned by Durkheim in his study of "elementary forms" of religion in Aboriginal societies. Because it provides the tribes name, the symbol is present during the gathering of the clan. Its presence during these scenes, the totem comes to represent both the scene and the strong emotionals felt, thus becoming a collective representation of the group. [1]

For Durkheim, religion is a fundamentally social phenomenon. The beliefs and practices of the sacred are a method of social organization. This explanation is detailed in Elementary Forms "Book 2/The Elementary Beliefs", chapter 7, "Origins of These Beliefs: Origin of the Idea of the Totemic Principle or Mana". According to Durkheim:

god and society are one of the same…the god of the clan…can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of a plant or animal that serves as a totem.[2] The group members experience a feeling of a loss of individuality and unity with the gods and according to Durkheim, thus with the group.[3] ....


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence



"... Katz and Daniel Dayan began assembling a library of those live broadcasts of historic occasions that enthralled a whole nation, or the world. Their 1992 book, Media Events, representing some 15 years of collaboration, is now in print in seven languages. Support for this research came from the Markle Foundation and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California where Dayan and Katz spent part of each year. Katz subsequently joined the faculty of the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania as Trustee Professor in 1992, and also directed its experimental Scholars program for post-doctoral study. In Jerusalem, he is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Communication, and former director of the Institute of Applied Social Research. ...."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elihu_Katz

See the Google online book here: http://books.google.com/books?id=Z64eoZiik...p;q&f=false

See also http://msradio.huji.ac.il/nomorewar_nomorepeace.pdf which is Elihu Katz & Tamar Liebes, ' 'No More Peace!': How Disaster, Terror and War Have Upstaged Media Events', International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), 157-166.

"... If ceremonial events may be characterized as "coproductions" of broadcasters and establishments, then disruptive events may be characterized as "co-productions" of broadcasters and anti-establishment agencies, i.e. the perpetrators of disruption...."



Who would prefer a festive combat between padded, steroid-driven super-behemoths over days of real rioting featuring agents provocateur, speeding armored vehicles, machine gunnery, and millions of angry, hungry citizens?

[Magda Hassan]

American Football: Under-age sex trade booming at Super Bowl

Thousands of young girls are trafficked by pimps cashing in on the biggest sports event in the US
By Mickey Goodman in Atlanta

Sunday, 6 February 2011

REUTERS
Airline staff in Dallas are trained how to spot girls and young women being flown in to work as prostitutes


Pimps will traffic thousands of under-age prostitutes to Texas for today's Super Bowl, hoping to do business with men arriving for the big game with money to burn, child rights advocates said.
The country's largest sporting event, the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers will make the Dallas-Fort Worth area a magnet for business of all kinds, including the multimillion- dollar, under-age sex industry, said activists. Authorities are trying to combat the annual spike in trafficking of under-age girls that coincides with the game.
"The Super Bowl is one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States," Greg Abbott, the attorney general for Texas, told a recent trafficking prevention meeting. Up to 300,000 girls between 11 and 17 are lured into the US sex industry annually, according to a 2007 report sponsored by the Department of Justice and written by the non-profit group Shared Hope International. Some 90 per cent of runaways and children whose parents force them to leave home fall into the trade and are often beaten, drugged, raped or imprisoned to force compliance, said the report.
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Pimps tattoo girls with dollar signs or the word "Daddy", and take them to unfamiliar cities where they are more vulnerable.
"At previous Super Bowls, pimps hired cab drivers to turn their vehicles into mobile brothels," said Deena Graves, executive director of the child advocacy group Traffick911.
"We are expecting thousands of under-age domestic minors to be trafficked to the Super Bowl," said Nancy Rivard, founder of the non-profit Airline Ambassadors International. Non-profit groups working at the 2010 Super Bowl in Miami supplied the figure, she said.
Law enforcement agencies and advocacy groups rescued around 50 girls during the previous two Super Bowls, said Graves. Six were registered on the Center for Missing and Exploited Children website. One had been trafficked from Hawaii.
To fight the trade, authorities, child welfare advocates and the airline industry are collaborating. Representatives from American Airlines, Delta, United, Qantas and American Eagle are holding a training session to help them spot signs of trafficking. Rivard will also work with another 100 flight crews to distribute materials on flights.
Some 67,000 people signed a petition on www.change.org opposing sex trafficking as part of a campaign by Traffick911 called "I'm Not Buying It!".
The campaign has attracted heavy hitters such as the Dallas Cowboy Jay Ratliff, a three-time Pro Bowler, who made a public service announcement entitled "Real men don't buy children. They don't buy sex".
Girls who enter the grim trade face harsh treatment and danger, according to a Dallas police report in 2010. Few who emerge are willing to speak about it. Tina Frundt, 36, is an exception. Now married and living in Washington DC, Ms Frundt was lured into sex work at 14 after she fell for a 24-year-old who invited her to leave home in 1989 and join his "family" in Cleveland, Ohio. That family consisted of the man and three girls living in a motel. When Ms Frundt declined on the first night to have sex with her boyfriend's friends, they raped her. "I was angry with myself for not listening to him, so the next night when he sent me out on the street and told me... [to earn $500] I listened," she said in a telephone interview.
Ms Frundt paced the streets for hours and finally got into a client's car. When she came home in the morning with just $50, her pimp beat her in front of the other girls to teach them all a lesson and sent her back on to the street the next night with the warning not to return until she had reached her quota. The scenario was repeated night after night as Ms Frundt's pimp moved his stable across the Midwest. Any sign of rebellion led to further beatings. Escape seemed out of the question. "I was a teenager in a strange town with no money and no place to go," she said. She finally escaped by getting herself arrested.
Typically, pimps recruit unwitting girls at shopping centres, mall events and on the internet. Once ensnared, shame, fear and psychological manipulation make it hard for them to break free. Clients hook up with girls via the internet, through hotels, massage parlours, strip clubs and escort services, the report said.
Seconds of play, hours of razzmatazz
If you have never watched American football, tonight's Super Bowl will be as incomprehensible a spectacle as an Aztec sacrifice would have been to the Conquistadors.
The game will be played in an air-conditioned stadium with a roof, in warm and mid-western Arlington, Texas (home ground of the Dallas Cowboys). From the roof are suspended the world's biggest HD video screens, each 60 yards long, so that the crowd in the stadium can see what's happening in close-up and watch the replays, essential to understanding the intricately choreographed brawl.
Although the rules change every year to make the game safer or more exciting for television (the latest change is a ban on hitting an opposing player helmet-first), the basics are simple.
The aim is to take the ball to the end zone of the 100-yard-long field. The team with the ball is allowed four attempts to advance 10 yards. Play stops every time the ball carrier is brought to the ground. If a team gains 10 yards, they start again with another four attempts. If they fail to gain 10 yards in three attempts, they usually use their fourth to kick the ball as far down field as they can.
There are two basic kinds of play:a run or a pass. For a pass, the quarterback, the leader of the offense, usually throws the one permitted forward pass. Look out for running back James Stark and wide receiver Antwaan Randle El.
By coincidence, today's evenly matched teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers, have a history in the game's rust-belt origins and are the only remaining working-class names in the league. The team from Green Bay, a port on Lake Michigan, was founded 92 years ago, sponsored by a meat packing company. But today's game would be as unrecognisable to the meat packers of inter-war Wisconsin as it would be to most Brits.
The players 45 on each side since the introduction of unlimited substitutions are in action for a few seconds at a time. Ninety minutes of playing time will take three-and-a-half hours in real time.
The half-time show, meanwhile, has become a grisly index of music-industry has-beenery, today featuring the Black Eyed Peas.
Ridiculous? Of course. But what a spectacle.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...05745.html

[Ed Jewett]

Oh, what a fine mess we are here in America.

[Ed Jewett]

Sunday, February 6, 2011

The Criminally Infested Super Bowl

It's not good enough anymore to just have our little day of diversion, watch a game we don't care about, talk some trash and drink a beer.

Oh no, now it's the merging of political propaganda and our favorite corporate pastime. Fox News meets the spirit of Vince Lombardi in a festival for violence lovers.


War criminal and world wide wanted man George Bush brought his smirk to the Jerry Jones suite and didn't even get a shoe thrown at him. Oh yeah, I think homeland security confiscated those at the door. Condi Rice was there too. Perks for the perverted.

At least Georgie and Condi got a slight taste of what they have dished out. The half time show was torture.

If you turned on the pre-game show to get some jock talk, you got to see a tribute to the reanimated corpse of a 100 year old actor who once portrayed both a football player and a president.

Revisionist history as told by the 'winners.'

Last and maybe worst, O'Reilly and Obama entered the 'no spin end zone' before the game to tell the fans of the orderly transition coming to Egypt.

"We're this far from scoring."





Green Bay wins! Reagan and Lombardi celebrate somewhere in the nether world. Bush goes back into hiding in his Dallashome for the criminally insane and Obama finishes the last of the White House Yuengling Lager, smokes a cigarette and declares Super Bowl Sunday a national holiday.

Ain't America grand .....

Posted by kenny's sideshow at 10:15 PM