3-18-05, 8:54 am

I admit that I have been a baseball fan longer than I have been consciously anything else – a Dodger fan from the South Bronx since the Summer of 1951, when I was seven years old, it was still called the East Bronx and the Korean War was raging.

My first memories of racism were in arguments with Yankee fans (who were the overwhelming majority in our poor neighborhood. The Yankee fans enjoyed especially putting down the Dodgers Black players, particularly Roy Campanella, (Campy) whom they compared unfavorably to Yogi Berra. The two were about even in ability but Roy was older, having lost years in the big leagues thanks to a Jim Crow system that Yogi, in a concrete example of 'white skin privilege' didn’t have to worry about. Dodgers ace pitcher Don Newcombe, though, was a special target. Even the Yankee fans, influenced by an ideology that defined their success as equivalent to Divine Right, rarely attacked Jackie Robinson, for whom they had a grudging respect. The overt racist arguments was less true of Puerto Rican kids, who by the time that Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1957 represented a majority of the neighborhood, and, even though they were overwhelmingly Yankee fans, realized that they were not considered 'white' in the larger society.

Newcombe, the Yankee fans often argued, choked in the big games because Blacks could never be trusted in the big games. I always defended Don who did lose a lot of big games. But as African American Cardinals Pitcher Bob Gibson, one of the greatest clutch pitchers of all time, would prove a decade later, that had nothing to do with skin color. Many years later I was mortified to find out that Newcombe had viciously red-baited Paul Robeson in Small’s Café in Harlem, creating a conflict that almost ended with him getting his brains beaten out by the patrons, who had far more respect for Paul than for Don. In the spring of 1953, when I was nine years old, I heard a male adult tell a bunch of kids in a schoolyard that a terrible thing was about to happen. This had nothing to do with the Korean war, which was still going on or Joe McCarthy who was fomenting red baiting hysteria. Rather, the acquisition of Dodger rookie, Junior Gilliam, had created a situation that when Joe Black pitched, Gilliam, Jackie and Campy were on the field, and the Black Cuban outfielder Sandy Amoros was playing, there would be a 'Black majority' on the Dodgers and the end of civilization as we knew it. When I contended that the Dodgers would be a better team with Gilliam, which turned out to be true, the adults egged on the kids to attack me

I am still a Dodger fan. Those battles were good for me in that they taught me to stand up for what I believed in. They also meant that I had African American friends, who were fellow Dodger fans in large numbers, in school, and was always suspicious of racist ideology, since I both knew African Americans as people weren’t like the stereotypes that trickled down to us in the slums and the African American players certainly had no relationship to the stereotypes.

This is a long subjective introduction to our Capitalism Gone Mad article for the day – the congressional investigation of steroids in baseball, which is being carried out with a hint of HUAC’s famous Hollywood investigations.

First there are friendly witnesses – Curt Schilling, great pitcher and not so great Bush supporter playing, maybe, the role of Ronald Reagan at the 1947 HUAC hearings, being groomed for a future career in politics (anything is possible in American politics). Mark McGwire, who did very great things with a bat and was and is a decent person, saying that he will not engage in 'naming names,' a decent and moral thing to do. I doubt the committee will hold Mark and some of the other players in contempt and eventually send them to jail, as they did to the 'unfriendly witnesses' of 1947, the Hollywood Ten. HUAC also had its sleazy informers, 'professional witnesses' who made their living by testifying against people and often writing nonsense 'exposes.' These hearings have Jose Conseco, as trustworthy, I think, as Howard Rushmore, a 'friendly witness' who founded Confidential Magazine, the great scandal sheet of the 1950s. It is unlikely that there will be a formal blacklist run by major league baseball of those who refuse to testify and stand on the Bill of Rights. It is also unlikely that an ex-steroid user (one thinks of the Arnold Schwarzenegger) will come forward like Whittaker Chambers of 'Pumpkin Papers' fame with evidence that he squirreled away in a barbell to show that steroid use in sports was introduced under orders from the Soviet KGB in the 1970s when Schwarzenegger was pumping iron as a secret agent of the East German Stasi, dealing steroids as part of a conspiracy to undermine the security of the 'free world,' which as everyone knows is directly linked to its sports teams. If you think that sounds pretty wild, you might look at some of the 'contentions' made over the years in the HUAC hearings. You might also remember the Bush administration’s rationale for the Iraq war and the outrageous 'swift boat' ads its henchmen ran against John Kerry in the last presidential election.

First of all, what is a Congress which can’t legislate effectively about energy, health care generally, the power to declare war, and corporate crime, going after baseball players who take steroids to 'enhance' there performance. Politicians collectively after all spend hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate money to get re-elected by creating mythologizing their performance.

Steroids are a health danger, but in no way comparable to the health danger that 45 million people without health coverage in the United States represent. Or the return of tuberculosis as a significant disease with the spread of homelessness and the decline in public sanitation. Or the use of heroin, crack cocaine, and other illegal drugs that lead directly to violence and crime. Also, the spectacular rise in diabetes in an atmosphere in which food processors sell to youth junk food diets that promote obesity and chronic health problems that are contained and maintained by expensive prescription drugs is a far greater public health problem than steroids.

But steroid use is a social problem, and social problems are not solved by punishing their victims. Athletes take steroids to gain competitive advantage at any cost, even if the cost is their health and lives. Gaining competitive advantage is hailed in the larger economy and enhanced by deregulation, mal-regulation, and under-regulation of corporate enterprise and economic life generally. Reactionaries who currently control the Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court in the United States, compensate for this fundamental social failure by seeking to 'regulate' personal morality. As long as we keep gays from marrying, defend the Super Bowl from Janet Jackson’s cleavage, keep woman from having abortions and at the same time remove the federal guarantee to provide for families with dependant children, fill the jails with marijuana users and reduce the Bill of Rights to the right to bare arms, we can watch the games we love assured that they will be played on level playing fields (when nothing else is) while our reactionaries search and destroy all television programs that seek to explore major contemporary issues and encourage us view life in between commercials rather than live it.

It would be fine if athletes didn’t take steroids. It would be better if little leagues and school teams weren’t encouraged to win at any length. It would be much better if much less money was spent for 'revenue sports' that provide multi-million dollar jobs for a tiny number of elite athletes. The money might even be spent for serious physical education for youth.

It would also be much better if working class youth could be encouraged in our class divided society to develop interests in literature, social sciences and physical sciences, and talk about them with the confidence and enthusiasm that they (and I was one of them) have about professional sports teams. The kids I grew up with were much more knowledgeable about baseball then they were about school work, even though the intellectual skills of learning about the teams and the players weren’t that different than doing school work well.

It would be great if we had political parties that would give working class people something to cheer about the way they cheered for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa instead of having politicians who obscure their own ineffectuality by calling McGwire and Sosa to testify before them to 'alert' a public about an important social problem. Yesterday, the media did its job by alerting the public that Scott Peterson got the death penalty, and Robert Blake was found not guilty while such 'small stories' as the escalating oil prices, the continued carnage in Iraq, the appointments of UN baiter John Bolton to represent the U.S. at the UN and Paul Wolfowitz, who needs no introduction, to lead the World Bank, a post for which, even by 19th century capitalist standards, he has no qualifications, were mentioned and largely buried).

A colleague of mine recently referred to the Bush administration as 'Reagan on steroids,' a wild unscientific analysis that I loved. Besides having the Dodgers win the World Series, (Karl Marx would probably say that all of the teams have the working class as their primary fans, so it is 'incorrect' to identify one team with the advance of the working class) I really hope these idiots in Congress don’t screw up baseball or encourage Bud Selig, the Commissioner who turned the All Star Exhibition Game into an event to decide home field advantage in the World Series, to continue to screw up baseball. Congress seems to be investigating steroids in baseball with much more enthusiasm than they are administration policies which continue to court and create disasters.

Young people will continue to take steroids until the values of 'winning at any price' isn’t encouraged at every level of the society, and bigger is not considered better in everything from the economy to personal appearance. Rather than being 'role models,' athletes and entertainers are, as sociologists noted long ago, 'idols of consumption' for masses of working people who live routinized lives at work and at play, larger than life figures who often come from working class backgrounds and succeed without being dull organization men, good to shoes, stooges and hacks. In that sense, they perform a healthy social function.

Young people, particularly working class and minority, live in communities that have much greater problems that steroids use. And progressives in Congress have much better things to do then engage in a 'show and tell' sham of investigation that targets users, not producers and distributors of illegal products.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.