Another bad month in a dreadful year. Dudgeon is high, patience low. Civil disagreements between smart folks deteriorate into fights. Even high-minded dialogue shows a tincture of personal pettiness. And still no one actually fights. A barren calendar for a month forwards and a month back. Promises for a great November that no one truly believes.
Let’s see if we can stretch the tether just a bit more, then. Make the leash taut.
I had come to defend Money May, not to bury him. Then he complemented his racist diatribe against Filipino Manny Pacquiao, the world’s best fighter, with a lame apology. That was the hardest part for reasons worth exploring.
Nothing else is going on. What, that phenomenal scrap in Glasgow on Saturday? Nah, it wasn’t televised in the U.S.
It was available on the internet. Puerto Rican super featherweight Roman Martinez against Scotsman Ricky Burns for the WBO belt. That “trinket”? Yes, but don’t tell the Scots; they derived a good bit of pride from their new world champion.
You know what else was on the internet last week, don’t you? Floyd Mayweather Jr – the great annoyance calling itself “Money May.” For reasons unclear to anyone, he was checking in with his myriad fans, answering his cell phone and stuttering about Filipinos’ skin color, culinary tastes and average height. He insulted a national icon of the Philippines because that’s what he does. Trainer Nassim Richardson knew it better than any; he didn’t talk about Islam in front of HBO’s camera – Money May’s great enabler – because he knew where Mayweather’s small brain would go with it, and he knew that could cause real trouble.
But let’s talk about racism for a moment. Actually, let’s let Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of novelist Philip Roth’s masterwork “Sabbath’s Theater,” have a shot at it:
“I’m proud to say I still have all my marbles as far as racial hatred is concerned. Despite all my many troubles, I continue to know what matters in life: profound hatred. One of the few remaining things I take seriously.”
Sabbath was speaking the unspeakable, then, expressing a deep contempt for an entire country’s worth of citizens. Much of Roth’s point was satirical, though: Don’t demand “real” if hatred, in whatever form it expresses itself, makes you uneasy.
It’s doubtful Mayweather hates Pacquiao; he lacks that much focus. But Mayweather’s rage is genuine, rage about something, the American system, perhaps, whose name even he dare not speak for fear of losing revenue. Mayweather is unworthy of comparison to Muhammad Ali in any context, of course, but we’ll make one anyway, and be done with it: Ali would not have apologized two days later. Ali espoused things far more offensive – to his own countrymen – in his time, and he lost a lot more than a Reebok sponsorship, too.
But see, Ali had character.
Here’s one more bit of bad news about Mayweather. Last week’s antics did not cost him a single fan. Not one. As time washes the miasma of dudgeon away, we think a lot more like Mickey Sabbath than we confess; we don’t take racism a fraction as seriously as we tell others to. Besides, an American who’s black, rich and powerless insulting a Filipino congressman is about a ‘1’ on the racial-grievance meter.
But, but, that’s a double standard! Of course it is.
Writing of not losing fans, though, how about that Tony Margarito? He was out and touring the country last week. He’ll be one half of a pair that breaks the domestic attendance record in November. For if Pacquiao was able to approach that mark with a Ghanaian sharing the marquee, he’ll surpass it easily by fighting a Mexican in Texas.
There’s the promotional calculus: Pacquiao vs. Mexican in Cowboys Stadium sells tickets. Margarito was the only notable Mexican in the Top Rank stable Pacquiao had not beaten. “If it makes dollars, it makes sense,” right?
That brings us to a Labor Day thought or two. What Mayweather and Margarito have in common is an exploitation of Americans’ belief in the free-market system. There was a time not long ago Americans saw the market for what it was: an amoral means for setting prices imperfectly. Then out of a combination of laziness and cowardice, we made the market our country’s moral arbiter.
A free market could not have handled that burden, and our market was far from free. After President Nixon floated the world’s reserve currency in 1971, Americans began playing an economic game different from any the world had seen. Those that tell you today that a national debt of $10 trillion will bankrupt our country said it about $10 billion years ago and $10 million before that.
We haven’t handled the world’s printing press all that badly, but we haven’t handled it too well either. We allowed the market an authority it did not deserve, and it took us down a long road towards collective misery. Americans’ wages are deplorable, given the reported values of the corporations for which they work. And while the market cannibalizes itself and its participants, we still pay it homage.
On this first Monday of September, we might ask, Where did labor go? The market took care of it; a generation ago, a man could support his entire family writing columns like these.
So we come to a moment of disgust, whether with Floyd Mayweather’s speech or Antonio Margarito’s hand wraps, and devoid of a moral compass, we look to the market to fix it for us. We ask a corporation to cancel a contract or a stadium to cancel a show. We demand the market do our job of punishing Floyd and Tony. Goodness, that’s rich.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter.com/bartbarry
