Author: Brian Carnell

How far has the National Basketball Association fallen since the height of the Michael Jordan mania? According to USA Today’s NBA Commissioner David Stern is already resigned to the fact that Saturday night’s XFL game on NBC will probably have a higher rating than Sunday’s NBA All Star Game.

I don’t think anybody expected the NBA to maintain the sort of ratings success it had during the Jordan years, but the prolonged decline was huge — NBA ratings declined 35 percent since Jordan’s retirement, and this year ratings are down 17 percent from last year.

Why? Ironically because the NBA has all of the features of the XFL while trying to be a real sport. Violence? Marcus Camby tried to hit Denny Ferry and ending up decking his coach. Aggressive comments from players? Just listen to the tape of Allen Iverson calling a fan a “faggot” (and to be fair to Iverson on that point, the NBA needed to clamp down on the bizarre behavior of a small number of fans a long time ago). Fans who are there for the spectacle? Just rewatch that disgusting footage of Phoneix fans applauding Jason Kidd playing his first game after being booked for assaulting his wife.

On top of that — the game really stinks. Turn to the always blunt Charles Barkley, now an analyst with TNT, to set the record straight,

You know what’s weird? All the teams that are good are old. The young guys have a ton of talent, but they do not know how to play, plain and simple.

About the only good thing for the NBA was the rise of the Los Angeles Lakers last year, but now Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant seem more interested in talking to reporters about why they dislike each other rather than going out and winning games. Again, Barkley calls it like it is.

That these guys are arguing about who’s the man makes me sick to my stomach… For any kind of sports fans, it’s got to make you sick to your stomach they’re bickering like little kids.

I think all of the NBA’s problems go back to the Latrell Sprewell incident. After Sprewell wound up with pretty much a slap on the wrist, rather than take the obvious lesson that if the NBA didn’t shape up people would stop watching, the players seem to have instead decided that pretty much anything goes — that they can do and say anything without consequence.

Lets see how long, however, the NBA can afford those multi-million dollar salary deals with the 3.0 average rating the NBA’s getting this year. A few years ago it looked like the NBA would reign for a long time as the pre-eminent American sport, now it’s one step away from being even less popular than hockey.

Yesterday I wrote an article for another site about the debate over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. George Will provoked the debate anew in a Newsweek column basically defending the NEA but trashing its funding for what he called “postmodernist” art. Defenders of what passes for art these days were horrified with Salon.Com running an article by Carina Chocano saying that anyone who said the state could decide what wasn’t art was a fascist (which, of course, was accompanied by the author’s own vision of what the NEA should fund, which sort of made her argument irrelevant).

Anyway, while visiting the BBC’s web site I came across the perfect example of the inanity of much contemporary art. The story, Man ‘destroys’ life for art, describes how “installation artist” Michael Landy on Saturday will begin his latest exhibit entitled “Break Down.” Basically Landy is going to take everything he owns, and with the help from assistants, reduce it all to rubbish.

It’s supposed to be some sort of statement about consumer culture, but more likely on how far art in the Western world has sunk. The best part of the BBC story describes a previous exhibit by Landy, saying that “in 1994, his still life composition of a bin full of rubbish at the Karsten Chubert Gallery in London was accidentally thrown away by a cleaner.”

The interesting thing is that Chocano tries to beat Will at his own game by attempting to belittle the conservative faith in the free market to produce art. Chocano notes that instead the free market has given us shows such as “South Park” and “Temptation Island.” The only problem with that argument is that the only people who think “South Park” and “Temptation Island” constitute art are the insulated postmodernist academics in art and English departments across the United States.

One of the most unintentionally amusing examples I’ve run across of this was a brief phase a couple years ago where I read every novel and story that the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. One of the collections of Hammett’s short stories had an essay written by a post-modernist who blabbered on for 10 or 11 pages about how rather than being well written mystery stories, instead Hammett’s work was a prime example of the postmodernist claim that meaning is always subjective and reader-determined since the “reality” of the mystery novel constantly shifts (the kindly butler in the first chapter is revealed to be the brutal murderer in the last chapter).

Should women buy guns for self-defense? According to a Violence Policy Center study, the claim that women can protect themselves with guns is a myth. Unfortunately the statistical analysis they use to make this case is absurd and an excellent example of how poorly designed statistical analyses are used to deceive.

The actual statistics cited by the VPC are accurate enough. In 1998 only twelve women shot and killed an attacker in a justifiable act of self defense. In the same year, about 1,100 women were murdered by attackers who used handguns. Since a woman is more than 100 times as likely to be killed with a handgun than use a handgun to kill an attacker, the VPC argues that the notion that handguns are a viable option for self-defense is ridiculous.

The problem with this claim is it assumes the only time a woman successfully uses a handgun to defender herself is when she shoots and kills a would-be attacker. What about the woman who shoots her attacker, thereby disabling him, but he survives? Not an act of self-defense according to the VPC. What about the woman who pulls a gun on her attacker causing the attacker to flee without the woman firing a shot? Not an act of self-defense according to the VPC.

We know from analysis of handgun use by police and private individuals that when a person uses a gun in self-defense, rarely does that use result in the individual actually firing the gun, and rarer still does the use of a gun in self-defense result in the death of the attacker. The mere presence of a gun is often more than enough to convince an attacker to flee the scene rather than risk serious injury or death.

By focusing equating successful self defense with the death of a perpetrator, the VPC tries to mislead women by drastically diminishing their likely usefulness in defending against an attacker. The VPC should be ashamed of itself for giving out such distorted information and perpetuating its own deadly myth.

Source:

A Deadly Myth: Women, Handguns, and Self-Defense. The Violence Policy Center, January 2001.