Speaker 1: It's great to welcome back to the program today.
Steve Almond, who's the author of the New York Times bestsellers Candy Freak and Against
Football.
The new novel is called All the Secrets of the World.
And you can find him on Twitter at Steve Almond Joy.
Steve, great to have you back on today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good to be with you, David.
Speaker 1: So we reviewed in the aftermath of this horrible incident that took place
on the NFL field with DeMar Hamlin, your appearance with Fox News host Laura Ingram, where you
pointed out some of the things she has previously said on her program, which she didn't particularly
like.
And there was so much that took place in that interview, and I know many in our audience
really appreciated it.
So let's just start at something very, very top level.
What happened with DeMar Hamlin was very visible in the sense that it happened at a very particular
moment in a game.
He suffered a cardiac arrest during a game and that makes it a much more interesting
media story because it has a sort of beginning, a middle and presumably some end where he's
now been released from the hospital and so on and so forth.
The truth is, and you've been writing about how there's a much slower motion story that
afflicts many other players that doesn't lend itself to this beginning, middle end of, hey,
it happened during the game, which is the brain injury and the cumulative effect of
football.
Talk a little bit about how the media reaction is so dramatically different to what took
place on the field over a week ago versus that bigger story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of crazy like you saw in the appearance with Ingram.
I basically said, hey, you know, there there are these big media events that, you know,
the reason I'm even snuck on to your fascist network is because you know, somebody let's
find a loop tard who hates football.
It's a kind of a zero sum thinking propagandist thinking.
Yeah.
And I tried to sort of calmly say to her, you know, the NFL's own actuaries did admit
that 30% of their players are going to wind up with brain damage because of the accretion
of these subconcussive events, invisible inside the helmet, thousands of them absorbed over
a career, and literally they cause brain damage in this major American workplace.
And you sort of set it before her, like, what if 30% of Fox News were getting brain damage?
I think actually they're getting brain damage, Right.
What if that by by design?
But I think what if this was in another American workplace and just try to set out for her
the the monstrous double standard that applies when it comes to football, that there's this
workplace where literally a third of the employees are going to get and it's just crickets.
It's like no reaction to that at all.
And it's because and I think that's actually writ large, the media's general reaction.
It's a complicated story.
It's a story that's happening out of you.
And in fact, the NFL paying off that lawsuit, settling it is precisely what the NFL wanted
to happen.
Their nightmare is junior say I was family where Michael Webb, Mike Webster's family
or any of these guys, even Tony Dorsett, you know, famous players and their families talking
about what it's like to live with CTE.
They just want none of that in the public eye.
And they're content, I think, in a sense with the DeMar Hamlin type media story, because
that is is you point out that's going to be very satisfying.
He's getting better the medical you know he was he recovered and God thank God he's getting
better.
But let's step back and say literally for every DeMar Hamlin, there is another player
who is in his forties or fifties or sixties who doesn't know where he is, who doesn't
recognize his family anymore, who suffered permanent cognitive decline and brain damage.
And that's happening out of you.
And I think that's kind of the deal that Americans make.
If I can't see it really, in a sense, what's fascinating to me, David, where a lot of businesses
are in the empathy suppression business and that's what the NFL is in, its in the empathy
suppression.
And their players have to suppress their empathy, but also by implication, the fans also have
to suppress their empathy.
They have to really occlude their moral imagination so that they cannot imagine that scenario.
And that's how I think we continue to be able to consume stuff that's really destructive,
whether it's a football game or hamburger or whatever it is.
We ignore the slaughterhouse and we take a big bite of the bacon cheeseburger.
That's kind of the big deal of American capitalism.
And when you try to connect those dots and say, I know you can't see it, I know that
in your fragile minds that we're hiding from you all.
The child labor that makes are miraculous devices.
I think most Americans, myself included, to a large extent, agree to that.
It's a kind of complicity because we don't want to look at the underside of these complicated
moral undertakings.
It's too complicated, too nuanced, and it's too psychologically and emotionally inconvenient.
Speaker 1: And with, you know, I think you can you can find in other sports not exactly
analogous circumstances, but moral.
Questions that come up, maybe we can say, I mean, you know, with the World Cup in Qatar
for a decade, I talked about corruption was how it even ended up in Qatar.
Slave labor and death in terms of the building of the stadiums, claims that there's going
to be kosher food.
But then they say then all of a sudden there's no kosher food.
And it's based on, you know, the the religious perspective, all these different things.
And then at the end of the day, I'm from Argentina, and every four years I want to see if maybe
we're going to get a win.
And we finally got it.
And I watched the games right at the end of the day.
I watched the games.
A my making a moral trade there in some sense.
I mean, I guess I kind of am, but it feels like it's a different one than with football
because it's well, I don't know.
I mean, what's different about the Qatar World Cup thing and then saying football's bad for
the players brains, but I really enjoy it.
I'm going to watch it anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, I think they're the same it's the same cognitive dissonance that and
I guess what I tried to do in against football was not say, football's down and brutal and
you shouldn't, you know, consume it because it's misogynistic and systemically racist.
And I didn't you know, I think those things happen to be true.
And it's also a remarkable spectacle.
And it's also, you know, what's happening in the culture and therefore a way to feel
connected to it or you have a personal connection to your team.
And those two things have to live side by side.
And what I think the media tries to do is sort of partition them out and say, Well,
it's time for your 5 minutes of moral contemplation and anguish, and now it's time for your 3
hours of game.
Right?
And I think it's very uncomfortable when people have to live with this sort of negative capability
that two opposing thoughts have to be held in the mind and heart at the same time.
But that's like what adults are doing all the time if they're living, you know, sort
of awake in some way.
And I think it's partly what Fox and other propaganda outlets are in the business of
trying to suppress.
They want everything to be either or.
It's never both.
And and so, you know, when I come on the Ingraham Show, the Kyron, which I couldn't see, of
course, because I'm sitting in a little van just staring at a black dot with Laura Ingram
interrupting me in my ear.
But what I what I see later on is they're they're trying to turn you off to football.
That's what the Kyron reads.
And it's just this classic, how can we make you afraid?
Who's trying to, you know, how can we exalt your grievance so that you can hide from your
own vulnerabilities?
We will help you with that.
And what to me is really sad is is the sense that there isn't an opportunity like I go
on The Ingraham Show and I realize we're not going to have a serious discussion.
A certain point.
I go, okay, I'm going to take my shots here because you're not going to actually be in
a good faith dialog with me about how complicated football is that it can be beautiful and binding
and blah, blah, blah, and narratively very satisfying.
And at the same time that it's got a set of values and practices that are just inherently
corrupt and that is not ever going to be the discussion that I can have with with her.
So I just we just get into a brawl, which is really just sort of feeding the anger tainment
industry that she's in.
But there does exist a world where they're used to in media, where that was really literally
the rule of the Fairness Doctrine.
Mitt said, you cannot have a single outlet that just puts out one idea or philosophy
or set of propaganda.
You have to have the essence of free speech is sort of different shades of opinion, reasonable
opinion coming up against one another.
That's what you that's the reason I lament the death of the Fairness Doctrine, because
it created the opportunity for somebody like Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson or any of
these propagandists to be challenged in real time and to not just be able to blather basically
what I view to be kind of brainwashing propaganda at their audience with nobody having a chance
to say, hold on, Laura, you just said that only certain kids, the only path out for certain
kids in America is by playing football.
Are you admitting that there's systemic racism in this country that disadvantages kids of
color and especially poor kids of color?
It sounds like that's what you're saying to your audience.
Can we have a discussion about that as well?
Speaker 1: That's that's not a conversation that is easy to imagine happening in good
faith on Fox News, as you point out.
You know, in terms of football, I believe I correctly understand that recently football
ratings are down to some degree.
And there are those on the political right in the United States that say it's because
of the kneeling and the woke and, you know, the stuff that that they say about it.
Do you think that the the brain injury awareness of the brain injury component is a factor
or is it just the fragmentation of audiences as there are more and more alternatives to
watching live sports?
That is really what is to blame or is it hard to know?
Is it a combination?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
And I think probably on the margins there are some people who are sort of marginal football
fans who have either stopped watching or maybe cut back their consumption.
But it's still the biggest thing in America.
And I think the Hamlin injury happening at the time it did became such a huge story because
it's a monday night game, because there's two teams that were really good, the ratings
were really high.
And I just have the feeling as I was trying to sort of explain like football is not going
to go away because the government is going to ban it.
Football's not going to go away because the woke mob is going to take it away.
That's part of the old you know, they're going to take your guns, they're going to take your
hamburgers, they're going to take God.
They're going to.
Speaker 1: Give gas stoves.
Now is the new one.
Speaker 2: Right?
Well, right.
It's like this idea of if you try to make any moral improvement in the culture, we've
got to frame it since it's the enemy of our business interests, we got to frame it as
some sort of assault on your personal liberty or your prerogatives of privilege.
And I think football is going to diminish in popularity only at such a time as enough
fans sort of say, I think there are other things that I can consume that are narratively
satisfying to me that don't cause me to come up against my own sense of maybe I'm rubbernecking
people getting brain damage.
And those those those wires are really hard to connect.
There's a great book that was written by a former NFL player years ago, and he said,
I dream of a day in which football isn't necessary for the American culture, because I really
do think there's a direct line between kind of the reason that America is not able to
put sensible gun control measures into place.
The reason that our sort of popular culture is awash in all these images of violence and
our video games and, you know, and football, I think there is like this underlying kind
of need to purge our aggressive impulses and to kind of consume that violence that I think
is there's a through line there.
Nobody wants to connect those dots.
But it's not a coincidence that most of the world watches football, that is soccer.
And our big sport is, you know, is is American football, which is just I know people try
to what about with hockey and this, that and the other and it's like okay yeah any sport
can have its dangers.
But baked into football is really big strong fast guys smashing into one another.
It's hidden underneath the helmets and the uniforms.
But if those behaviors were happening outside the context of football, I'd be like, Oh yeah,
that's aggravated battery.
Speaker 1: Is there a way to make football safer in the sense of, you know, you read
about where you can have sensors in helmets which can track cumulative sort of impact
on a player during a game.
And then in theory, you could pull them out once some threshold has been reached or, you
know, all the all these different ideas.
On one level, it's like when your brain changes direction that quickly doesn't matter how
thick the helmet is, it's the brain hitting against the skull to some degree.
So like can football actually be football and be be safer to the players?
Speaker 2: Well, it's kind of what you're saying.
Like when you say football, I think what you're implying is that there's a certain amount
of risk going back to like Cormac McCarthy sort of saying like, what is it that we get
off on?
And it's basically kind of the risk, the big hit.
We don't want to admit it, but there's a primal sense of these guys are putting their life
on the line and why are they lionize?
Because they can survive and play through injury because there's something real that
that that I think is lacking somehow in our lives.
Probably.
That's like this primal, atavistic need to see other people play out a kind of danger
that we're insulated from.
So I don't think there's any way around the fans unacknowledged but powerful lust for
other people to risk on their behalf.
I think that is part of like modern, the modern condition.
I do think that there if there were financial incentives, you know, ibid, the fox sexual
harassment, like only, you know, a corporation that makes a lot of money only changes or
a particular demagogue like Laura Ingraham, they only change their tune when they're hit
in the.
Pocketbook.
The only way the NFL is going to change their behavior is if fans change their behavior
first.
And there are plenty of things that could happen.
As I tried to point out, like tomorrow, weight limits would be one way since these players
are now average, whatever, £270.
Well, what if they weren't bulking up in the gym?
And what if, in fact they were, you know, £200?
It's not going to cure it, but it would decrease the amount of impact in the G-forces, the
amount that his brains are shaking around.
Putting monitors in helmets would create a different set of incentives because suddenly
players like a like a pitcher with the pitch count.
Suddenly, a player would be saying, I am not going to go in with my helmet or I'm not going
to partake in a big hit, because if I do that, I'm going to be pulled out of the game because
it's bad for my brain.
They don't want the fans thinking about that.
Again.
The goal of the NFL is to keep the dots unconnected and they have like a willing accomplice and
Fox and the right wing in this country, which essentially says implicitly or explicitly
a buffoon like Trump says it explicitly like, oh, yeah, you know, football's like a man's
game now.
It's sissies.
They throw the flag all the time.
What they're basically saying is like, I'm into violence.
I know I'm personally a wimp who tries to get out of the military and a what I'm into.
I get off on watching other people be violent, Right?
Speaker 1: Steve, last thing.
In the limited time we have left, you mentioned the Fairness Doctrine.
One of the difficulties, I think, of a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine now is that so much
of what we are now we're consuming wouldn't be subject to the Fairness Doctrine as it
previously existed because it's on the Internet.
Would you want to see something specific applied to the Internet when it comes to that, or
is that a different question?
Speaker 2: Well, I honestly think that if you have the power I mean, the Fairness Doctrine
came into being because in the early 20th century, something happened that the founders
could not have foreseen.
Right, David?
What they what happened is mass media and some people in Congress who were smart said,
oh, my God, there's now this tool that can sway the hearts and minds of Americans.
And if it falls into the wrong hands, hands that are avaricious and only interested in
business, or even worse, that have a kind of moral agenda that's inimical to democracy,
that would be terrible.
We can't let that happen.
We have to have some form of regulation.
And people, of course, on the right and greedy people freak out about that because propaganda,
as you know, is very it sells, right?
Ingram and Tucker and all those people, they are fear mongers for a living.
They make a tremendous amount of money doing it.
The Fairness Doctrine said, look, that is, if we're going to have debates, it's important
that media cover and participate in debates of of issues that are publicly important.
But they have to do so in a way that includes all reasonable shade of opinion.
That's what's in the Supreme Court decision, all reasonable shade of opinion.
Now, I happen to find a lot of the outright lies and innuendo and insinuation that that
demagogues traffic in to not be reasonable shades of opinion, but whatever.
I'm even cool with having those propagandists do their thing.
I just want somebody like you or me to have equal time to say.
Laura, when you say that only certain kids are going to make it through football, what
you are admitting is that America is systemically racist against people of color and we do not
give them schools and social workers and economic opportunity in their communities.
What we give them is like the lottery ticket of maybe you can find your way out, not by
the content of your character or your intelligence or creativity, but because you're really good
at throwing a ball and getting tackled and eventually getting brain damage.
For my benefit as a Kassidy little, you know, wimpy person sitting on my couch getting off
on the risk that you, you and that your body assumes.
So like, that's what I want is for people like Tucker and Laura Ingraham to stop being
such cowards hiding in their little media silos, you know, plowing out their propaganda
to fearmonger and brainwash their audience.
Because I really have a personal stake in this.
People in my life who are important to me or used to be important to me no longer think
in a reasonable way.
They've been scared out of their wits, literally.
And I think it's I think a lot of families, Trumpism is the symptom of this, but I think
a lot of American families would be like, you know what?
We would be so much healthier and our family systems would be so much healthier if there
wasn't propaganda allowed on any side.
Right.
But especially on the right, where I think it's all about exalting people's grievance
so that people can hide from their fears and their vulnerabilities, like the stuff that
we have to solve and work out if we're going to solve climate change and inequity and the
violence that besets the culture, all these very real problems, we can't do that if we
are allowing a for profit business, allowing media to become a for profit marketplace.
It's not.
It's supposed to be a civic institution.
It's not supposed to be a for profit segment.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
And as a as a topic tangential to this, you mentioned the grievance component.
While all at the same time saying it's the left that has become about grievance, which
is just another instance of the projection that we're seeing.
But that's that'll have to be a topic for another day.
Steve Almond The new novel is All the Secrets of the World.
You can find them on Twitter at Steve Almond Joy.
Steve, always great to talk to you.
Speaker 2: Hey, David, it's a delight to talk with you.
And the thing about the Fairness Doctrine, which we're going to finally get restored
at some point is you can you would be fabulous.
I want to see a David Pakman sitting in the same D.A.s with one of these propagandists
and saying, look, I do not consent to the false narrative that you're weaving.
Like, that's my dream.