'It's very disappointing, disrespectful, wrong, to snub the media conference in that way. For the money she earns, she could at least pay the honour of giving a few words.' How it became OK to justify huge pay inequalities by seeing celebrities as public property.
We are reacting exactly to the script.
Because they know that oppressing our anger and outrage is too difficult, in order to dominate us, they cleverly channel it off, siphon it away (this irritating pollutant to capitalist order), to a place where it cannot be mobilised by a political opposition to Big Business and their elitist agenda. This inert place is something like a 'facile moral highway'. It is not actually to do with morals at all. It is to do with raw emotions, personal fears, tribalism and disillusionment. It is also a perfectly controlled, artificial civil war (without the revolution), handed to us by those in power. It is designed to keep us fighting ourselves, keep us reinforcing and consuming pulp fiction, and keep us distracted from confronting the real enemy.
So when we feel let down in this way, by, for example, a bad-tempered professional tennis player, it begs the questions, "What is it we ask for, from a sportsperson's public persona?", "How should a sportsperson aim to present her/himself through the media?", "Does he/she in fact have any such obligations to communicate with and present a persona to the public?"
The Williams sisters (tennis players) are notoriously monosyllabic in their post-match press conferences. But do we have any right to feel outraged (on a quasi moralistic level) by this lack of engagement? So often, our argument bases itself on the extortionate salaries these sportsmen/women commission. Cue the usual quip: 'For the pay they get, they could at least have the decency to say a few words to the public!' Really? Doesn't this make a mockery of what it means to earn an income? If a Tesco worker gave a 5 minute interview at the end of every shift, they wouldn't suddenly justify moving from £7/hr to £7000/hr.
Do we want to prop up society's rampant wealth inequality system, or do we seriously want to address it? Rather than pretend to justify it, by being 'outraged' at Venus Williams keeping her mouth shut in the media box, shouldn't we be taking on the power-brokers, the controlling elites, the Big Business culture of proud domination? It might be a very difficult task fraught with conflict, it might mean confronting our own delusions; but at the bottom of all of this, all we ask for is the chance to genuinely promote equal pay for people in all areas of society.
We are reacting exactly to the script.
Because they know that oppressing our anger and outrage is too difficult, in order to dominate us, they cleverly channel it off, siphon it away (this irritating pollutant to capitalist order), to a place where it cannot be mobilised by a political opposition to Big Business and their elitist agenda. This inert place is something like a 'facile moral highway'. It is not actually to do with morals at all. It is to do with raw emotions, personal fears, tribalism and disillusionment. It is also a perfectly controlled, artificial civil war (without the revolution), handed to us by those in power. It is designed to keep us fighting ourselves, keep us reinforcing and consuming pulp fiction, and keep us distracted from confronting the real enemy.
So when we feel let down in this way, by, for example, a bad-tempered professional tennis player, it begs the questions, "What is it we ask for, from a sportsperson's public persona?", "How should a sportsperson aim to present her/himself through the media?", "Does he/she in fact have any such obligations to communicate with and present a persona to the public?"
The Williams sisters (tennis players) are notoriously monosyllabic in their post-match press conferences. But do we have any right to feel outraged (on a quasi moralistic level) by this lack of engagement? So often, our argument bases itself on the extortionate salaries these sportsmen/women commission. Cue the usual quip: 'For the pay they get, they could at least have the decency to say a few words to the public!' Really? Doesn't this make a mockery of what it means to earn an income? If a Tesco worker gave a 5 minute interview at the end of every shift, they wouldn't suddenly justify moving from £7/hr to £7000/hr.
Do we want to prop up society's rampant wealth inequality system, or do we seriously want to address it? Rather than pretend to justify it, by being 'outraged' at Venus Williams keeping her mouth shut in the media box, shouldn't we be taking on the power-brokers, the controlling elites, the Big Business culture of proud domination? It might be a very difficult task fraught with conflict, it might mean confronting our own delusions; but at the bottom of all of this, all we ask for is the chance to genuinely promote equal pay for people in all areas of society.
