ESPN and National Unity in Support of Sad Cases
For the bulk of 2022, a significant slice of air-time on the various ESPN cable channels was devoted to the plight of Britney Griner, a professional basketball player in the Women's National Basketball Association who was arrested, tried and convicted of illegal drug possession in Russia while traveling to international competition. She wound up spending several months incarcerated before the US Government made a deal With Russia for an exchange of prisoners. As this drama played out, I tried to avoid the details of her case, other than hearing that she had pled guilty to the charges against her.
I do not doubt that she was a victim of circumstance, rather than a criminal, but shit happens all the time. In my hometown of Dallas, many years ago, the editor of an "underground" newspaper called Dallas Notes was sentenced to ten years for possessing a few cannabis seeds either found or planted by the police department in the back seat of his car. Other than a few hippie freaks, there was no support for Stoney Burns.
Month after month, ESPN reported on the words of "support" for her uttered by jocks, celebrities and politicians, including President Sleepy Joe.
The text of these words of "support" always implied that this is just the sort of evil thing Putin does, without going into any detail. WNBA game coverage regularly featured more words of support for her and pictures of such words on tee-shirts worn by fans. None of it made any real sense. If the injustice was really just a feature of Putin's insanity, all the tee shirts on earth and all the verbal support for Britney could not possibly budge him as his stubborn pursuit of world conquest that he started in Ukraine shows to this day.
Once the deal with Putin was done, we saw breathless coverage and a chorus of praise for all the support that led to this happy ending. You'd think that Putin suddenly decided to relent once he saw all those tee shirts.
As ridiculous as that dramatic nonsense was, it has been surpassed this past week with the saga of Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin who suffered heart failure during a nationally televised football same last week. He was in a collision with another player, and upon getting off the ground after the routine play, he collapsed and fell to the ground. Play was stopped and on-site paramedics performed CPR, and an ambulance rolled on to the field to transport him to a nearby hospital. I have nothing snarky to say about this story up to this point of Hamlin's ordeal. But ESPN, CNN and MSNBC provided nonstop "coverage" of the outside of the hospital through to the following morning.
There was no news as the emergency room personnel did their jobs.
Eventually, corporate voices identified as "The Buffalo Bills" and "The NFL" were quoted as stating that Hamlin had suffered cardiac arrest and that CPR had successfully restored his pulse. These banal and obvious "facts" were treated like major news. inevitably, with the on-site medical staff not making any public comment, "Experts" without any more information than your random ESPN viewer appeared on camera to explain what happened: the collision with the other player impacted his heart, causing it to stop beating.
Then the "support" started to crank up. Fans appeared outside the hospital and in front of the cameras. This built all week and at games this weekend, we got to see handheld signs of support for Hamlin. As I believe it has been impossible to avoid the hype surrounding this drama as Hamlin's condition was reported to be improving, I will cut to the reductio ad absurdum.
Tony Dungy, a former coach and now a talking head offered this warm and fuzzy thought about "all the support coming from players, coaches, fans and the country at large: It is great to see how this divided country can all set our differences aside to come together in support of this young man."
All the other talking heads nodded their agreement.
Pardon me while I upchuck.
His idea is that although some Americans believe that abortion should be legal and some believe it should be illegal, and some believe that Trump is a criminal trying to destroy democracy and some believe he is a great man who was cheated out of the last election --
We can all get together over the idea that heart arrest is a real bummer.
During this week of hype, of course, some axes got grinded:
Experts assure us that the cause, not a cause, but the one and only cause of this guy's problem was the collision. Anybody who speculates that vaccine injury to his heart muscle might have played any role is a lying lunatic.
Is this a great country or what?
Comments
any distraction from the failure of international policy
and the hollowing out of the treasury for some warlord overseas
helps keep people from waking up to more substantive issues
Well, speaking as a
lapsed EMT/first responder: I can see some differences.
With the Hamlin incident, everyone did their jobs to a T, from soup to nuts. As a result, more people are learning CPR, and even taking classes in how to use one of these newfangled AEDs that you see in wallboxes everywhere. I know the former like the back of my hand, and can still pull a perfect strip on Rescusi-Annie (remember, the tempo is now the Bee Gee's "Stayin' Alive"), but not the latter- it came after my time. Luckily, my wife is a current first-responder-trainer from her scuba instructor training, so I can get that training from her on the cheap. I always figured that if we needed one, she'd be using it on *me*. (;-)
It raised awareness (again) of the critical nature of early response to cardiac events, and that is a good thing. Otherwise, that awareness had been diluted by everything else going on, and the willingness of most people to *act* had been diluted by the fact that everyone has been given such blanket license to hate everyone else over the past decade or so. So I consider that to be all good. To me, it represents a little chipping-away at the idea that everybody else sucks, and therefore should be left on the sidewalk to die. The dude was released today, and that is a success story for first responders everywhere- and those are few and far between. As a first responder, the fact is that you recover bodies much more often than you save lives.
In the case of Ms. Griner, she fucked up. She knows she fucked up. It it were any of us in her position, we'd still be rotting in the gulag. So the administration got some virtue-signaling brownie points for doing what they did, and they didn't have to admit any fault (as they would if they were to, say, try to help out Julian Assange). I can find some gagworthiness there, because it was clear pandering on the part of the federal government. Whatever- most everything they do induces reverse peristalsis in me anyway, here lately. But somebody somewhere will regard that as the good PR move that it unquestionably is.
Other than the fact that the two of them were both pro athletes, there really aren't that many similarities. But there are things we can learn from both. Like, for Gawd's sake, don't fly to Russia with your weed or weed-derived product. I wasn't planning on going there anyway- but I could pitch an infarction tomorrow, and maybe now the chances are .001% less that everybody will just walk by me twitching on the sidewalk.
However, your mileage may vary. Be safe out there.
On edit- my wife just gave me the AED training for the most common brands, and it took all of 5 minutes. So, if you have one hanging on the wall in your place of work, ask your HR people for it. It is dead simple, so to speak. As they have always said, you could save a life.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
The two stories have almost nothing in common
.
other than the weird sentimental gestures of "support' coming from the fans cued up by the cable networks in what looks to me like a concerted effort to make people feel like they have power. In Griner's case, the implicit power is over the evil that is Putin. In the still ongoing Hamlin story, the first task of support invoked by the players themselves was prayer, as if God would be more likely to spare this man if the number of people praying was high enough. Holding up signs at other stadiums this past weekend underscored the nature of power being summoned up to tip the balance between death and life. I don't necessarily believe that anybody in the corporate structure of sports dreams this up as cynical manipulation of the audience, but in this decade in which our collective powerlessness has been thrown in our collective face by a sub-microscopic sized virus and our old comfortable lives are suddenly gone forever, the mythic power of mass prayer invokes itself through the idiot box.
Agreed that the para medics deserve praise. Standing outside the hospital with a sign, however, does not praise them.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Now I understand a bit better.
Some people will pray, some will act, some will simply walk away. My takeaway is that maybe more people might act now.
My last word on the topic: the best way to thank a first responder is to already be doing CPR when they get there, if it is needed. Preserve life, so that they can do their jobs on a possibly-viable victim, not a corpse.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Yeah, Griner
As you pointed out we had the same harsh drug laws, maybe still do...remember crack and cocaine? This is low information high feelgood news. It's what our government and corporations want us to look at, and not at them. Facebook journalism at it's best.
Whenever
I hear the government or the MSM speak.....all I hear is "Squirrel"!
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Good morning. Somewhere in the back of my mind I have
a memory of this type heart stoppage being a thing and of prior instances, and concerns so I took a quick peek and immediately found:
https://www.sportsmedtoday.com/commotio-cordis-va-88.htm#:~:text=This%20....
The whole let's pray about this thing bugged and still bugs the hell out of me for a ton of reasons, but I'm writing about the noted failure to invoke the vax jab as a possible ful or partial cause. Given that this is not a unique occurrence, I think it would rapidly trivialize all concerns about the vax jab damaging organs or overall health if the possibility that it was a factor was gratuitously tossed out in every case where there is no real specific indication of an identifiable link. Imagine a little blurb like the on on cigarettes -
That would almost certainly do more harm than good and, in reality, isn't really informative anyway.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
This is familiar
to old EMTs, the ones who remember the days before airbags (or even the days of 2-point seatbelts, before they added shoulder harnesses). We'd roll up on a motor vehicle accident that'd happened 10-20 minutes earlier, and find the driver with no pulse- but no really profound visible injuries, other than the bruising on the chest from impacting the steering wheel. Lots of those ended up being listed as "fatal accident caused by heart attack" after the coroner got done (it was the 70s, after all). But I'm quite certain that a lot of them fall into this category, with the heart stoppage coming after impact, not before.
I always regard the folks who refuse to wear seatbelts (since it is a violation of their Freedumbs) with some pity, as a result. Either eating the wheel or being ejected is no bueno, and then the first responders would still have to do CPR on an obvious decedent until we'd get them to an ER to be pronounced.
That's one of the reasons I didn't go back to EMS after college, even on a volunteer basis. You just have to do CPR on a few corpses to start to develop a really gallows outlook. Good for practice, I guess, but not something that recommends it as a career.
An airbag can hit you as hard as an NFL player, but it is still softer than the steering wheel. And the belts spread the impact out over a longer time interval, as well as minimizing it a little. Just a thought.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
The famous/infamous Dr. Malone
.
Said on a podcast that it is possible that heart damage from vaccination could be a contributing factor for Hamlin's heart failure. He specifically acknowledged that he had no evidence to make that any kind of a conclusion. It came up in response to the claim being made that there was zero chance that vaccine damage had anything to do with it. He did say that the video of the collision on the football field did not look like the baseball or hockey puck blows that have caused commotio cordis in other sports related cases. In those situations a projectile (baseball or hockey puck) scores a direct fit on the chest, traveling at very high velocity compared to the shoulder pad that was going no faster than the player wearing it. He also stated that prior heart damage from any source could make a person more vulnerable to impact caused heart failure.
Personally, I am not much impressed by opportunistic claims coming from any direction in the hype fest that follows from a tragic televised incident like this. The first such claim I saw on TV was made by an "expert" within 12 hours of the incident stating without any hedge that it was commotio cordis caused by the football play.
Welcome to network news in the age of Covid.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
In the 24 hrs after
the incident, Steve Kirsch (engineer-entrepreneur) posted that in a phone chat w Dr McCullough he mentioned it might be commodio, but that was reporting second hand, and so we didn't get any qualifiers from Dr Mc, which likely were in there.
Then a few days later, Jan 4, Dr Mc was interviewed by CHD, and noted it was likely not commodio as the player suffered a second cardiac arrest at the hospital, which presumably doesn't happen with commodio. He speculated in that interview the cardiac arrest might have come from an underlying hypertrophic cardio myopathy which in turn could have been caused by the dangerous jabs. All speculative as the hospital and family have given few details, and nothing at all about jabs and when they were given, how many. 95% of NFL players have gotten the shots. Dr Mc is calling for families to be more forthcoming with info about the shots, as hospitals are strongly disinclined to bring up that discussion as is the NFL, which last March discontinued its vaccine mandate.
https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/shows/good-morning-chd/nf...
Preemptive narrative management
That first "expert" got the basic truth established that the "hit" was THE cause. Anything that hits the media/social media gabfest thereafter is charging uphill. I do not much care about any individual "story," because I do not think that public opinion matters. But the "news" system rolls along its merry way, protecting the public from "disinformation."
Simple notions like "It is impossible to know some things for sure" and "sometimes there is more than one cause for a given effect" can be used by liars to undermine objective reality as reported by respectable news sources like The Walt Disney company (ESPN) or the other networks. In order to protect their product, information, they make sure to discredit competing narratives. There is not much chance that a mass uprising will ever well up over the side effects of covid vaccine, even if it turns out that the jab was the biggest single cause of this guy's near-death experience.
This is just the new normal. Not all that different from prior decades when religion and anti- communism set the limits of public acceptability: sex was taboo, Mae West's movie career was terminated, Lenny Bruce got arrested for making fun of holy water, and a slew of movie and TV professionals got blacklisted out of their careers. Then, as now, the worker bees who conduct the narrative control are just doing their jobs. It was probably pretty easy to convince yourself that commies, temptresses, and trash mouth comedians did not belong in the public eye. Today it is just as easy to dismiss the crazy people who can't respect the authority of our time and try to convince people that vaccines are poison.
To those of us who are the dissenting analogs of the blacklist, it is hard to avoid despair. Like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Richrd Prior, I try to find the ironies hidden in plain sight, like people holding up cardboard signs of support for Griner and Hamlin, while the corporate media markets their sentiment as proof of our national virtue.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Otoh, while it
might not be in all respects the complete mass uprising some of us would like to see, the US public does seem reluctant to continue to march in lock step on the covid vaccines, as only 14% or so of adults have gotten the latest booster. So, small victory as something seems to be happening out there in the land, perhaps , one can hope, the word getting around finally that these shots are neither safe nor effective.
Meanwhile other small victories -- the public health agencies and Big Pharma seem to be more on the defensive as more info seeps out as to the fraudulent nature of the covid vaccine approval process, Fauci is about to undergo what it expected to be vigorous questioning under oath by a congressional panel, lawsuits are underway which will reveal the extensive gov't pressure on social media platforms to censor dissenting voices on covid in violation of the 1A, and here and there in small numbers formerly fiercely pro-covid vaccine doctors and scientists are turning around and going public with their skepticism.
Undoubtedly in the process more stories will emerge showing how our public health agencies and corp media have been captured by Big Pharma and eventually these disclosures will reach enough of the public to matter. Something to be optimistic about, I conclude, as giving in to despair is all too easy.
I call it the sin of despair
.
Points well taken. Nothing holds still.
I was only focusing on the potential pissing match over what amounts to a factoid. The absurdity of the vaccine narrative will ultimately die its own death as did McCarthyism and the Hays Office. Other lunacies will certainly take its place.
What comes next, is a separate question.
I cling to the limited point that this ESPN ripple in culture is absurd on multiple levels.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Then there is this speedy science
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
@on the cusp That is funny and
That is funny and incisive!
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
I use an expression when dealing with
attorneys arguing over demanding documents. Typically, they want my client to produce documents their clients have in their possession. I tell the attorneys, "We have arrived at Silly School. If your client will hand us the documents, we will give them to you. Ok?"
Science has arrived at Silly School.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I know of no evidence which
indicates that Putin plans for world conquest, nor does he command the kind of resources and ideology which might make that possible. What is clear is that he does not want a nuclear armed neo nazi regime on his border.
Let me make myself clear. I. Do. Not. Care. what half starved, brutalized, never been away from home teenaged Czarist soldier committed what atrocity in whose ancestor's village 200 or so years ago. Not. My. Problem. If the Middle European diaspora wants to nurse an ancestral hatred of Russia, then let the members of that diaspora go back to their ancestral homeland and fight Russia themselves.
Mary Bennett
I agree with you
. I was speaking in the conditional, assuming the propaganda premise of Putin's evil. If one falls for that bullshit in the first place -- as the Griner "support" overtly does -- it follows that no amount of warm and fuzzy "support", like wearing a Free Britny tee-shirt in front of a camera, could possibly induce the Russian government to relent and overturn the verdict of its criminal justice system. The layers of bullshit can be confusing.
I try not to worry about the politics within other countries, but I have previously posted on this board my opinion that Putin is probably the wisest and most reasonable leader of a nation state this century.
The Evil Putin premise is so preposterous that I assume readers of this board will see the tongue in my cheek when I mention it while talking about our media/propaganda world view.
The Evil Putin assumption is only rarely expressed on this board.
Sorry to be so ambiguous and thanks for posting on my thread.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Apologies for the misunderstanding.
I have been away from this forum for some time and was not aware of your work here.
I do agree with the substance of your diary, with the add on that I do wonder if Griner learned anything from the experience, like, maybe, respect the laws and customs of countries you are visiting.
Mary Bennett