Turn Off Your TV--Part X

The Making of Sports Into a Secular Religion

by L. Wolfe

The same theoretical outlook that was behind the mass brainwashing 
of Nazi Germany is found in the mass crowd phenomenon of spectator 
sports. Sigmund Freud's principal point in {Mass Psychology 
and the Study of the I} was that masses of people can be organized 
around appeals to the emotions. Mass rallies, for example, appeal 
not to reason, but to the emotions, for the appeals to be successful. 
The most powerful such appeals are to the {unconscious}, which 
has the power to dominate and throw aside reason.

``The mass has never thirsted for truth,'' he writes. ``They 
demand illusions and cannot do without them.  They constantly 
give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost 
as strongly influenced by what is untrue as what is true. They 
have an evident tendency not to distiguish between the two.''

Freud further states that under this condition, with man's reason 
dominated by {emotionalism} and unable and {unwilling} to look 
for Truth, the individual in a mass or crowd loses his moral 
conscience, or what Freud calls his {ego ideal}. This is not 
necessarily a bad thing for the individual, the evil Freud claims, 
since the moral conscience which he later named the {Over I} 
or {superego}, causes man to ``unnaturally'' repress his basic 
animal instincts; this, Freud claims, produces neuroses.

In a crowd organized around people's emotions, the individual 
will exhibit a tendency to ``let himself go,'' to free himself 
of all moral and social inhibitions: ``Isolated, he may be a 
cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian--that is 
a creature acting by instinct.... Nothing about it [how a person 
behaves under such crowd condition] is premeditated....''

``It [a crowd] cannot tolerate any delay between its desires 
and the fulfillment of what it desires,'' writes Freud, stating 
that this is why the individual is so willing to let himself 
become a part of a powerful mass experience which can gratify 
those emotional desires.

Such crowds, observes Freud, have regressed to {the mental life 
of children}. They operate, not according to reason, but according 
to irrational, emotional desires. In this mindless, emotional 
state, individuals are easily manipulated by leaders who can 
shift the values of the masses to coincide with the crowd's 
infantile fantasies.

We'll take a look at a typical sports crowd.

{You're watching a professional hockey game. Sitting next to 
you are an accountant and a school teacher, each in declining 
middle age. Below you is a teenage couple; over to the side 
is a banker, and just behind you are a couple of lawyers, with 
their young sons.

It's a close game. ``Knock that bum down,'' screams the lawyer, 
``Don't let him skate like that.''

``Kill him,'' screams the lawyer's young son. ``Put the body 
on him.''

A fight breaks out on the ice between two players. The crowd 
rises, cheering wildly as the home team player lands punch after 
punch, bloodying his opponent. The lawyers cheer the loudest. 
The announcement of penalties is greeted with more cheers for 
the home team combatant, as the referees escort the players 
to the penalty boxes.

Finally, the action begins again. A home team player breaks 
in for a clear shot on goal. The little black puck shoots into 
the net behind the opposing goalie. A goal. Lights flash all 
around and pandemonium breaks out in the crowd. The banker gets 
so excited that he spills his beer all over the teenage couple. 
Everyone is laughing. Everyone is happy, as they celebrate the 
home team's goal.}

Was there any difference in the behavior in that crowd of the 
adults and the children? Not really. What has been described 
is a common example of the {mass infantilism} that we have referred 
to.

Now think for a moment about the televised football game we 
described earlier. The person described was not {in} a crowd 
per se, but was watching a televised game in his living room. 
{Yet he displayed the same kind of emotional responses as if 
he were present at the stadium}. This demonstrates the power 
of televised sports to induce behavior in what the brainwashers 
call an {extended crowd}.

In the television era, there are two audiences for every sporting 
event:  one that is present at the event and one that is viewing 
the event, usually, as it happens, on the television screen.  
The first audience is limited by the size of the stadium, and 
even the largest stadiums are limited to well under 100,000 
people. The television audience, especially for a major sporting 
event like a football game, numbers in the millions.

The spectator in the stadium, as well as the viewer in the living 
room, are linked by the common perception of the events on the 
{playing field}. They are aware of each other's existence:  
The fanatic at home hears the crowd noise on the television 
set and sees shots of the packed stands. The fan in the stands 
knows of the massive television viewership {through his own 
and his fellow fans' habituated viewing habits.} ``If I were 
home, I'd be watching,'' he thinks. If he is at the game, he 
hopes to attract the attention of the television camera crews, 
so that he might be seen by the fans at home.

The television brainwashers like Fred Emery of Tavistock have 
noted this phenomena. Someone watching his favorite show is 
only {vaguely} aware that others are watching as well, giving 
rise to a sense of isolation.  The viewer of a sporting event 
is {keenly} aware of the existence of others, the brainwashers 
say, and therefore participates in a common, {mass experience 
of enormous perceived importance}. The perception of importance 
is self-validating: If one million people are doing the same 
thing, at the same time, it {must} be important.

Each sporting event, therefore, takes on a {psychological significance} 
to the viewer. It becomes a common, emotional bond between him 
or herself and {one million or more} other people. Some recent 
psychological surveys of Americans between the ages 15 and 50 
found that when they were asked to list significant events that 
occurred within their lifetimes, an extremely large number listed 
{sporting events}, and many listed several such events.

Similarly, among American males especially, this {co-participation} 
in spectator sports, creates a sense of {identity} with fellow 
{fanatics}. A Mets fan walking down the street seeing another 
person wearing a baseball cap with a Mets logo develops a sense 
of {comradeship} with this unknown other.  He gives him a wave, 
and maybe a raised fist, signifying solidarity with ``the cause.'' 
The same person will routinely avert his eyes from the gaze 
of a homeless person and even another person dressed the same 
as he. Thus, the {mass spectator experience} extends beyond 
the timeframe of any single game or even season, to become a 
part of the personality, a process of childlike {identification} 
with objects and feeling states.

The point to be made here is that viewing spectator sports in 
a habituated way, over an extended period of time, does alter 
a person's personality because it causes him to respond to situations 
from an emotionally determined set of reference points. As we 
said, it makes you stupid and more animal-like.

This is not something that can be turned on or off like a television 
set.  Just as we have explained previously that the {hidden 
messages} of the television stay with you even when the set 
is off, {playing back} even years later, so does this pattern 
of {emotional, non-thinking response}, caused by habituated 
viewing of sports, stay with you.

Playback

Now, think back to what we had said about the Gulf War and the 
briefing by General Norman Schwarzkopf on how the plan of attack 
against Iraq secured military victory. Try to remember {your 
response} to this briefing, that so openly and consciously was 
made to resemble a football coach's victory press conference. 
Didn't it call up the same kind of emotional response that you 
had when {your} team won an important game? Didn't you want 
to raise your fist in the air and say:  ``We really knocked 
the crap out of the Iraqis, didn't we. We really took it to 
them.'' {This is your sports mentality playing back, on cue}.

The people who organized that press conference {knew} that you 
had been programmed to respond that way. By using the {language} 
of sports to describe the war, they were triggering a {playback} 
of infantile emotions associated with spectator sports, limiting 
your critical reasoning capacities.

A month earlier, the 1991 Superbowl between the New York Giants 
and Buffalo Bills had featured a halftime spectacular, staged 
by Hollywood producers, with the ``nothing-should-be-spared'' 
cooperation of the U.S. Department of Defense, {celebrating 
the dedication} of the game to the war effort, then in its savage 
aerial bombardment phase. With 80,000 people in the stands wearing 
yellow ribbons for the troops standing and cheering, waves of 
military planes flew over the Orange Bowl. More than {150 million} 
people in this country watched the halftime extravaganza end 
with rock singer Whitney Houston screeching her way through 
the National Anthem. (Her rendition, complete with fireworks, 
was turned into a rock video and was soon the number one song 
in sales in the United States.)

As several commentators noted, the Superbowl had been turned 
into {the largest war rally in the history of the world}. It 
was the {spirit} of that Superbowl {war rally}, that ``coach'' 
Schwarzkopf evoked, quite consciously, with his briefing.

Be Like Mike

Let's shift focus slightly.  {You and your son are watching 
a

close basketball game, in its final seconds. The clock ticks 
down, as Michael Jordan, the superstar of the Chicago Bulls, 
takes the ball at midcourt.

``It's all down to one play,'' says the television announcer. 
``It's all up to Michael. They're clearing out the lane for 
him.''

Then the announcer is silent, as the clock ticks off the time 
in tenths of a second. It's under ten seconds now. Jordan starts 
his move toward the basket. Suddenly, near the foul line, he 
feints to his left, then twists around to his right, launching 
himself into the air. Somehow, he is propelled through a maze 
of arms, to the rim and he slams the ball through. The clock 
reads no time left.

``He's done it,'' screams the announcer. ``Or should I say, 
he's done it again! Amaaazing!''}

Did you ever think about what goes on in your son's mind as 
he watches the game? On the one hand, he is {fixated} on the 
screen, taking in the action as it happens. But something else 
is going on as well: He is fantasizing that he could ``Be Like 
Mike,'' as the ad for the sports drink says in its jingle, that 
he could be famous and spectacular like Jordan or another athlete. 
He will try to act out this fantasy, perhaps by trying to practice 
and copy some ``move'' or mannerism of the superstar athlete, 
or under certain circumstances by buying some product the athlete 
endorses. In such ways are sports {heroes} copied by the young.

But what about you? How do you watch the same events? You're 
in middle age or slightly younger. Superstardom has passed you 
by. In your heart of hearts, you know that you can't really 
``Be Like Mike,'' in that 35 to 45 year old body of yours. But 
the ``dream'' dies hard: You still can connect with fantasies 
and times of your youth, through the sports viewing experience.  
{You could have been like Mike, if only things were different,} 
you fantasize.

{You have been ``transported'' to an infantile state, through 
associations and identifications with experiences of youth}. 
This is made possible by the now-universal mass culture of sports 
and especially television sports; you remember some game that 
you may have seen or even played in, some experience akin to 
what is taking place on the screen in front of you. It is this 
power to make associations with an infantile, fantasized past, 
that is a key to much of the power that spectator sports has 
over you. {It is a way to shut off the reality of the current 
world, by calling forth a fantasy world in which your infantile 
self participates}.

Often, the habituated viewing of spectator sports will have 
the effect of creating a {false past} for the individual, in 
which he or she has so strongly imagined some fantasy from his 
childhood, that he now believes it to be true. Many males who 
never made it close to a football field will tell their friends 
that they actually played for their schools.

The habituated viewing of spectator sports calls forth the most 
infantile part of a person, and that infantilism often leads 
to a distortion of one's true self and past, further crippling 
creative reason.

None of this started with television; it has been going on far 
longer than that. But, as we have said before, the mass proliferation 
of sports through television has universalized this {neurosis} 
throughout much of the adult male population.

Brainwashing by Numbers

We have also noted that fanatics have their unique way to communicate 
with each other. The {language} of sports, meaning the terms 
used to describe various actions, rules, etc., of the major 
sports, have become a part of popular language. It is for this 
reason that the Schwarzkopf briefing could be understood by 
those watching it.

A major portion of the {sports language} is {numbers}--the endless 
amount of statistical information used to quantify and therefore 
analyze the events taking place on the {playing field}. These 
numbers are totally useless for the conduct of human affairs 
on a day-to-day basis. They tell people nothing about the real 
world or things that might truly matter in their daily lives. 
Yet, it is a simple fact, that more people can tell you what 
the records of the starting pitchers are in today's Yankee-Orioles 
baseball game, than where the dollar closed in Tokyo.

My father once tried to impress on me the frivolity of sports 
``numbers.'' He told me that when he was a young clerk in a 
shipping firm he was riding the elevator with a friend. He and 
his friend were rattling off a comparison between the batting 
averages of the then-Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants starting 
teams, arguing furiously over the merits of the players.

Later that day, my father was called to the office of the president 
of the company to bring some price quotes on brass valves. There 
was one missing.

``What's the price on this?'' the president asked him.

``I don't know,'' my father replied. ``I'll have to go look 
it up.''

``I was on the elevator with you a little while ago,'' said 
the president, quite angrily. ``I'd have gotten an answer immediately 
if I asked you Willie Mays' batting average. That you know by 
heart, but what I pay you to know you have to look up!''

But aside from creating useless and meaningless clutter in the 
minds of millions of sports fans, the statistical explosion 
around sports has had another, more important mind-destroying 
effect. It has tended to cause people to try to judge everything 
by numbers, by {counting} and in so doing, it has made them 
more prone to brainwashing through {public opinion polls} of 
the type we have discussed in previous sections of this report. 
The pollsters themselves have noted this. They say that Americans 
have been conditioned by sports statistics to accept the statistical 
results of polls as {inherently true}.

It is easy to see why from a typical sports argument. ``Listen,'' 
says one fellow. ``I say that Conseco isn't half the player 
that Cal Ripken is.''

``Oh yeah?,'' says the other guy, ``Well just look at his numbers. 
He has more career home runs, more runs batted in....''

``Right, but Ripken has a higher lifetime batting average and 
he has played in 1,730 consecutive games,'' the first fellow 
answers. And so on.

These ``debates'' take place {millions} of times, every day. 
In each, statistics are used as {accurate measurements}. They 
are accepted as {facts}, to be used in argument.

Poll results are presented in the same way. As a result of your 
brainwashing by sports and sports statistics, you never bother 
to question whether such results are fraudulent. ``Hey, just 
show me the numbers,'' says the sports fan. ``If it's a statistic, 
it's a fact.''

Such {statistical reasoning}, with everything placed into neatly, 
counted categories, with ``facts'' represented as columns of 
counted objects, is coherent with an {Aristotelian} representation 
of the universe. It leads to a linear interpretation, to a fixed 
reality.

{Truth}, as we have been discussing Truth in this series, can 
{never be defined from such arrays of statistically presented 
facts.} Truth is located in the {process} of creative reason 
that determines the hypothesis governing the means by which 
hypotheses {change.} The {Socratic method}, as practiced by 
Plato and the great Christian thinkers, like St. Augustine, 
seeks Truth in {what cannot be counted}, and in the rejection 
of a fixed, counted universe. It is {a quality of mind}, the 
same quality of creative reason that allows man to participate 
in God's creation and that distinguishes him from the animal, 
that alone determines Truth.

Habituated sports viewing leads to a fixation on {numbers} and 
the statistical representation of Truth.  This fixation {neurotically} 
reduces the ability of the mind to reason in the {Socratic} 
manner necessary to discover Truth.

The Gambling Disease

The fixation of the sports fanatic on numbers also leads to 
another addiction: Gambling. Sports gambling, both legal and 
illegal through an organized-crime controlled network of betting 
parlors, is a {multi-hundred billion dollar annual business}. 
Like sports itself, it is controlled and encouraged through 
the oligarchy's Dope, Inc., the international drug cartel which 
uses the betting process to launder dope monies.

The sports fanatic turned serious bettor, begins to associate 
{only} with the numerical content of the games, reduced to the 
so-called {odds}. According to studies, they care little about 
actual teams and tend only to have a ``favorite'' team if it 
wins money for them. To do so, to ``win'' money for the bettor, 
the team {need not win} its games, only ``beat the point spread,'' 
to lose by fewer points than the odds had predicted.

In the end, the sports gambler gets his {fix} from the thrill 
of putting himself at the {mercy of the gods of Fate}. He may 
pretend that there is science to what he does, that there is 
a ``system'' by which one carefully places his or her bets to 
beat the ``odds.'' But any gambler knows that what drives him 
to continue to bet is the sensation that when one has won, that 
he has somehow defeated the gods of Fate.

Figures show that the number of people afflicted with the {sports 
gambling neurosis}, a variant of the overall sports neurosis, 
is growing.  While some government officials profess concern 
about this, the fact is that it is the government itself which 
is increasingly directly sponsoring the growth of sports gambling. 
Several states, such as Washington, have now legalized betting 
point spreads on football and other games; it is justified as 
a means to generate revenue, with the argument being that if 
the state didn't tap the gambling cash flow, the monies would 
simply be bet elsewhere.

Some preliminary studies have revealed, however, that well-advertised, 
state-sponsored sports betting {encourages} gambling among people 
{who would not have thought to bet otherwise}.

Learning to `Root'

This leads us back to a discussion of {who} is responsible for 
the growth of the mind-destroying sports addiction in the United 
States and the role that television has played in that process.

As we have shown, before the advent of television, there was 
only one truly national sport, baseball, and its brainwashing 
effect on the population was limited. Not surprisingly, it was 
found in that pre-television period that sports fanaticism within 
a given population was dependent on the ability to attend games, 
be they at a ``major league'' or ``minor league'' level. The 
highest-penetration mass media of the time, radio, provided 
a means to maintain fan interest when it was impossible to attend 
games, but the effectiveness of that medium in promoting fanaticism 
depended upon the {possibility} of attendance at games.

This brings us to an important observation about how the brainwashing 
process works. The process by which someone becomes an obsessive 
sports fanatic is culturally learned. You are taught by American 
culture how to {root}, how to respond to the {cues} that bring 
forth the {emotional, infantile} responses from the individual.

A few decades back, I was in attendance at a Mets game at the 
old Polo Grounds in New York. By baseball standards, it was 
an ``exciting'' game, with the cheering crowd very much ``into'' 
the events on the field.

I couldn't help notice one fellow in our section of the stands 
who seemed quite ``out of it.'' He sat in silence as fans all 
around him rose to cheer a home run by the home team. At first, 
I thought he was rooting for the other team. Then, I saw him 
sit in the same stoney silence when they, too, hit a home run. 
I decided to ask him if something were wrong.

``I'm from England, you see,'' he said. ``I thought if I read 
some books about your baseball, I could follow what was happening. 
But I just can't get what you chaps are all so thrilled about.''

Such examples tend to disprove LeBon's contention that crowd 
behavior is based on what he called {contagion}, or simple ``copy 
cat'' type responses to what fellow crowd members were doing. 
Freud's observation that a crowd must be {cued} to respond to 
events, or directed by a {leader} is more to the point. The 
baseball crowd is {culturally led}, conditioned by a mass sports 
culture to make the ``proper'' infantile emotional responses 
to the events on the playing field.

The Englishman, whom I learned was quite a sports fanatic within 
his own culture--cricket and soccer were his obsessions--was 
completely ``lost,'' looking for {cues} in baseball.

The {intensity} of a person's connection to the sports experience--{how 
deeply you are addicted}--has some relationship to a {visual} 
experience, not just reading about them or listening to radio 
broadcasts. Stated another way, {spectator sports must be watched 
to ``hook'' you}. The more you watch, the more intensely you 
become hooked, the more infantile your potential responses, 
and the more impaired your creative reasoning powers, for the 
reasons previously discussed.

Television provides the perfect vehicle for the mass promotion 
of spectator sports brainwashing. It fixates the mind on the 
images on the {playing field}, totally immersing the brainwash 
victim in the sports experience. As studies done by media analysts 
have shown, television recreates the excitement of being at 
the event, while it is happening, establishing an identity between 
all those who are watching and all those present in the stands, 
in a way that even the most skilled radio sports announcers 
could only approximate.

Think for a moment about how you learned to root for a sports 
team.  Isn't it true that your first memory of spectator sports 
is watching a game with your father or brother? You learned 
that it was alright to respond emotionally to what you saw at 
the stadium or on the screen. You followed the {infantile} behavior 
of your elders in rooting for your team. Isn't it also true 
that among your first discussions about seemingly adult events 
centered on the exploits of one of those teams that your brothers, 
sisters, or parents were interested in?

This pattern of behavior is true even for areas where in-person 
attendance is not possible or only possible in a very limited 
way. It is true because of the widespread availability of spectator 
sports on {television}.

Who Controls Your Pusher?

As we have shown elsewhere, everything that you see and have 
seen on television is a result of decisions by a small elite. 
This elite controls the major television networks, the cable 
channels and the major production studios. This elite is in 
turn controlled, both directly and indirectly, by oligarchical 
banking and financial interests centered in New York, London, 
and similiar financial centers.

These are the people who deploy the brainwashers at such places 
as the Tavistock Institute and the networks of the Frankfurt 
School. They were patrons and promoters of such people as Sigmund 
Freud and Carl Jung, and were ultimately responsible for putting 
Hitler into power. As we have shown, they have promoted {television} 
as their principal means of mass-brainwashing control.

It is this {oligarchical elite} who have sanctioned the massive 
proliferation and promotion of spectator sports on television 
to brainwash you, in much the same way that their factional 
ancestors used the {Roman spectacles}, with their gladiator 
and other sports competitions, to control the masses.  With 
the approval of this elite, billions of dollars in television 
money was channeled into the promotion and expansion of the 
National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association 
(NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL), as well as major 
league baseball.

Starting in the late 1940s and continuing through much of the 
1950s, sports programming on television represented the single 
largest block of any programming type, enabling sports to achieve 
a saturation of the population as had never occurred before 
in history.

The sports teams themselves, until the most recent period, were 
owned by powerful families, many of whom had connections to 
either the {oligarchical elite} itself or to organized crime 
networks, sanctioned and controlled by this oligarchy and the 
organized crime-linked Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith 
(ADL). The Mara family--which owns football's New York Giants--and 
the Yawkey family--which owns baseball's Boston Red Sox--are 
examples of this.  Sports teams were often passed on as possessions 
from one generation to the next in these families, much as the 
oligarchs transfer their other possessions.

In the beginning, much of the money came from brewery-linked 
interests, who were in turn connected to criminal organizations 
during the Prohibition period, such as the Rupert interests 
that formerly owned the New York Yankees. Some of these ``beer'' 
connections remain today, for example between the Busch family 
and baseball's St. Louis Cardinals.

In the more recent period, there has been a growing interlock 
with interests associated with Dope, Inc.  and its propaganda 
and defense arm, the networks of the ADL. Often these interests 
are included within financial groupings that own teams; for 
example, George Bush's family involvement in the Texas Rangers 
baseball team. Occasionally, they appear undisguised, as in 
the form of organized-crime-connected George Steinbrenner, the 
once and future owner of the Yankees.

Overlap With Media Elites

There is now also a direct overlap between media and sports 
elites. One example is television mogul Ted Turner, the owner 
of Cable News Network and the Atlanta Braves. Another example 
is Time/Warner's ownership of Madison Square Garden, along with 
the New York Rangers hockey team, the New York Knicks basketball 
team, and the MSG sports cable network.

At the behest of the oligarchs who control our political establishment, 
professional sports has been given important exemptions from 
anti-trust provisions, enabling the major sports teams collectively 
to operate {as if they were a trust}, in the worst robber-baron 
tradition of that term.  Sports team management rigs ticket 
prices, establishes television contracts, sets salary and compensation 
rates, etc.

This has created a pool of {billions of dollars} for the massive 
promotion of the nation's sports addiction; as is usually the 
case with mass addictions, the {addicts}--the sports fanatics 
themselves--fund both the profit and the expansion of their 
own addiction. At this point, sales within the U.S. economy 
alone related to consumer {sports purchases}--tickets, equipment, 
cable services, literature, but excluding the costs of the salaries 
of players, television contracts--are estimated in the {several 
hundreds of billions of dollars} annually.

Getting Your Daily Fix

If sports are a mind-destroying addiction, then television is 
your {main pusher}. It is the principal means by which the majority 
of the nation's sports addicts get their {daily fix}.

On any given day, no matter what the season, there will be approximately 
30 million {different} sets tuned to sporting events, according 
to an industry study. Obviously, on certain days, with ``special'' 
games like the World Series or basketball playoffs, those numbers 
will double, triple, or even quadruple. For an event like the 
Superbowl, the figure might go higher still.

While early television sports programming helped expand interest 
in mass spectator sports, it also helped {hook} our population 
on habituated television viewing. In the early 1950s, when Americans 
first bought television sets in large numbers, more than half 
the purchasers listed {sports programming} as their main reason 
for the purchase. That was not surprising:  More than 30 percent 
of all people buying newspapers say that they do so for the 
sports pages and well more than half say that they read the 
sports pages first and longer than any other section of the 
paper.

The sports seasons are to be compared to a {serialized story}, 
whose conclusion is unknown, lasting over a period of several 
months. Thus, each sports contest has a {past}, a history that 
involves the teams in the event and their records and deeds 
prior to the game. It has a {present}, in the events of the 
game itself. And, it has an {anticipated future}, the implication 
being that even though the result of a particular contest might 
be final, the outcome of the season, as a whole, remains in 
doubt.

When the season concludes, there is always next season: ``Wait 
'til next year'' is the refrain of the fans of losing teams. 
A variant of that for a person who roots for {many} teams in 
the same area, is ``Wait 'til {the} next season,'' when he hopes 
that a team in another sport will do better than the one that 
has just ``failed'' him.

In this way, the viewer is {programmed} to move from game to 
game, from season to season, without leaving his couch. Sports 
contests, especially major sports contests, are thus the perfect 
{soap opera television serial} and as such encourage habituated 
viewing. It should not surprise anyone that the brainwashers 
who profiled response to television knew this from their earliest 
studies.

None of this would work if television couldn't bring the mass-brainwashing 
experience to the subject in an effective way. The television 
camera limits the field of view. It can create isolation from 
the common crowd experience described by Freud and others in 
his mass psychology.

Early television, while capturing the excitement of seeing a 
sports event as it was happening, often underplayed the sense 
that millions were watching as the viewer was watching. In part, 
this was because of the limits of the new technology: The single 
camera tended to fixate on the prime point of action in each 
game and the crowd miking was poor. In part, it was because 
early announcers tended to chatter too much. Having come from 
a radio experience, they described the events on the field, 
thus duplicating what the camera could see.

Much of this has since been corrected, from the brainwashers' 
standpoint. New camera technology has made available an explosion 
of {viewpoints} of each game, with the development of slow-motion 
instant replay and multiple camera angles. The first games featured 
a single camera; Now there might be as many as 10-15 at a single 
football game for example.  Crowd miking and modern sound mixing 
bring the action closer to realism and directly into your living 
room. And importantly, the improvement in the quality and size 
of the images on your screen draws the mind deeper into the 
audiovisual event.

There are still some problems with announcers and commentators, 
who, from the brainwashers' standpoint, don't know when to allow 
the images and sounds from the {playing fields} to speak for 
themselves. The balance is still being ``fine tuned,'' so to 
speak. If the mix still offends the true sports fanatic, there 
is always the mute button on the remote control.

Roone Arledge, the former head of ABC-TV Sports, and the man 
who developed the format for ``Monday Night Football,'' talks 
about sports programming needing to capture the full sense of 
the ``spectacle.'' The idea, he says, is ``not to bring the 
game to the viewer, but to bring the viewer to the game.'' There 
are variations on that theme but the concept is the same:  You 
must {grab the mind of the fan} and then hold it within the 
fantasy world being projected on the screen. If successful, 
your efforts will succeed because the {infantile emotional connection} 
to the event will be made by the viewer: He will get his {fix}.

By the way, Arledge no longer heads ABC Sports: He now heads 
ABC News!

And Now to the Videotape

Before we move on to the last section of our report, we should 
make some observations on the role of television news in promoting 
your sports addiction.

The sports slot is usually the longest single slot in the local 
evening news program. It features highlights of the local teams' 
games, as well as highlights from other games of sports in season. 
According to profiling information, the local sportscast is 
most often given as a reason for watching a particular station's 
local news programming. Such surveys found that viewers cared 
most strongly about how their sports news was reported.

In addition, while, as we have reported elsewhere, viewers had 
trouble remembering details of news stories reported, studies 
have also shown that most sports fans {will remember the major 
sports story of a given night}.  They will also remember the 
scores of their team's games.

In large part, this is because much of the language of sports 
is {numbers}, and the {scores} are the major content of sports 
news programming. Sports addicts are like idiot savants; they 
have a surprising memory for otherwise useless numbers.  The 
more television gives them such numbers, the more they will 
clutter their minds with them, and the less they will be able 
to exercise their power of reason.

Instead, they will use them to communicate the next day with 
their fellow brainwash victims: ``Hey, did you see McGuire's 
40th homer on the news last night? 475 feet over the left field 
wall. Some shot, huh?''

``I know how to make everyone go crazy, completely nuts,'' the 
brainwasher Hal Becker said a while back. ``Just have a phony 
highlight tape of a big football game.  It's easy to do. Then 
run the wrong score. People will go crazy. They won't be able 
to figure out what happened.  They need the television sports 
news to {confirm} the results of what they saw with their own 
eyes in the afternoon.  If they don't match, they'll go into 
a loop.''