Ron Artest is promoting his new rap CD this week and not playing professional basketball because he punched some fans in the face at the end of a game in Auburn Hills last week. After the press conferences, interviews, rulings by the NBA and filing of lawsuits, the media had a field day. We have not seen the same tape replayed so many times since the World Trade Center towers fell.
But there are other things happening in the world today. Ukrainians are protesting for genuine democracy. American troops and insurgents are fighting each other to see who can liberate the Iraqi people first. There is genocide occurring in Darfur. Compared to their relative importance, why has the story of an NBA misfit received a disproportionately high level of attention? The basket-brawl raises moral questions about individual responsibility and highlights the growing distance between (primarily) young, over-paid, black athletes and their (generally) older, over-paying, white fans.
But the real reason we talk so much about Ron Artest is simply because we have nothing else to talk about. America is bored.
Let me qualify that by saying instead that America merely chooses not to talk about the real issues. We focus on who threw which punch at whom and on the stiffness of the penalties instead of realizing that there are deeper social issues - about race relations, wealth distribution or the nature of our celebrity culture - that need to be addressed.
These larger problems exist at an international level too. But America chooses to ignore the rest of the world. Politically, this choice is reflected in our foreign policy of unilateralism. In sports, while the rest of the world plays what we call soccer, we play baseball and have the gall to call it the "World" Series. In education, more than 80 percent of Americans cannot identify Iraq on a map, according to CNN. Obviously we do not even know where the rest of the world is located.
America is so big (and so politically and economically advantaged) that it is just too easy not to see or think about anyone but ourselves. There is so much local news that we never hear what is going on in the rest of the world, even if it may be more important. We are parochial and self-absorbed. The attention given to the Artest story is a case in point.
But we are also bored. Why else would we watch the network dress up some Joe Shmoe who sings in the shower and turn him into an American idol overnight? This boredom stems from our lack of engagement with the world. Our boredom, therefore, is self-imposed.
Last week I classified all the problems in the world as self-imposed. We smoke cigarettes and develop lung cancer. We engage in unprotected sex with strangers and contract HIV. We eat McDonalds and get, well, supersized. The reason we do not just abstain from smoking, eating fast food or having unsafe sex is because there are lots of people out there whose job it is to manufacture cigarettes, sell burgers and fries, and even to document and fight the spread of AIDS. It is in their interest to see that these problems persist because if there were no addicted smokers, no fast food nation citizens, and no AIDS epidemic, they would be out of work.
We create problems in order to solve them. That is what we do. We are problem solvers.
Problems keep us busy and entertained. That seems to be the explanation why we to do stupid things and why every solution generates another problem and every answer raises another question. Of course, some problems generated by our solutions to other problems are not always unintentional or, from some perspectives, entirely problematic. The rebuilding of Iraq, for example, is great for certain American businesses, even though it should benefit the Iraqi people.
Just because our problems are self-imposed does not mean that we shouldn't work to solve them. There are plenty of pressing, immediate challenges at the local level that we should talk about and try to solve. With the Ron Artest case, attention should be drawn to the deeper social implications, not to Artest himself or to the specifics of the altercation. I am afraid we are too caught up in the hype to realize the deeper issues at stake. I am afraid that, as Americans, we focus on unimportant issues and distractions at the expense of larger, serious problems facing our society and the rest of the world.
Thank you, Ron Artest, for giving us another problem to solve. For giving us something to talk about. I mean, thanks for nothing.
Noah Trugman is a senior majoring in philosphy. He can be reached via e-mail at noah.trugman@tufts.edu
