No, The New York Times, Michael Vick Doesn't Get to Be a Hero

The New York Times, last Saturday, ran this article on the "renaissance" of Michael Vick:

“I told people I thought he would be a great story and he would do the right things off the field,” said the former Colts coach Tony Dungy, NBC’s “Football Night in America” analyst, who counseled Vick during and after his incarceration. “But if people had pressed me and asked if I thought he could get back to this level, I would have to say probably not. I would have said he’ll get a certain percentage of the way back, but how could you ever get all the way back?”

A "great story"?  Remember who we're talking about here: Michael Vick, former quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, who orchestrated an enormous interstate dogfighting ring. For five years. Fortunately the article here did mention his involvement with the dogfighting ring, but as these things usually are, it was only mentioned in passing as a low point against which could be juxtaposed a "football renaissance" for Mr. Vick. It has all of the ritual trappings of a religious revival, complete with throngs of adoring disciples:

But just inside the locker room door, at least 50 journalists huddled so tightly last Wednesday that when the player they were waiting for, Michael Vick, surveyed the gathering, he could only shake his head slightly.

“Amazing,” Vick whispered.

And monasticism:

Vick’s studying, though, has been crucial. Members of the Eagles organization said Vick had to be reminded to leave the training facility. The film room has become his sanctuary, and he has learned the Eagles’ offense better than he did Atlanta’s. 

Plus some martyrdom:

“I have been under pressure my whole life,” Vick said. “Pressure to take care of my family and a lot of other things. This is football — it’s pressure. But you’ve also got to make light of the whole situation. That’s what I try to do. There’s always going to be pressure. But it brings the best out of you.” 

I'm not very happy about this situation as a whole. Vick might be a good football player. He might even be a really good football player. But honestly, is the fawning love from sports commentators and even that symbolic bastion of Balance and Truth, The Grey Lady, necessary? Again: the "best" brought out of Vick by that pressure he's been feeling his whole life? Based on that, his "best" includes management of a dogfighting ring, at least three dogs from which had to be euthanized because they were completely incapable of being re-socialized.

Unfortunately, this sort of coverage and cultural acceptance is not unique. There are any number of other examples of apologia or glorification of famous people, even those with the deepest and darkest scars: those that excuse Roman Polanski's raping of a young girl on the basis of his "artistic genius", for example, or Paris Hilton apparently posing for her mugshots now, plus any number of highly publicized celebrity trials after which the celebrity is almost universally let off the hook. If anything, these cases prove that real justice and the legal system very rarely intersect (though ideally they should). So long as the powerful have both the cultural and real, financial capital to turn the United States justice system into a mockery of itself -- where money can buy powerful lawyers, or where wealthy defendants can defer cases endlessly, or where prosecutor's offices and police forces abuse and coerce those without the resources to fight back -- it becomes incumbent on us as a society to be aware of this fact. When Michael Vick's prison sentence becomes a stepping-stone in our discourse to his rebirth, there's a problem that has everything in the world to do with power.

Perhaps this bleeds into a trickier question of the concept of heroism and valorization generally. I'm becoming more and more convinced that heroism is inherently problematic in that it produces a really simplistic discursive representation of people (who tend to be famous and usually rich) that whitewashes the evils they commit for the sake of creating a narrative that paints them as good. Look at the term "flawed hero": the "flaw"-edness of the hero is a deviation from the category, not an inherent part of it. People are way more complicated than this characterization gives them credit for, and in our minds, it generates a very visceral, very emotional reaction when these "heroes" are criticized (see the many, many defenses of Roman Polanski or Mother Teresa -- there are a lot).

So while I don't think that we should instead be counter-categorizing these people as inherently "evil" (because no one and nothing can be inherently anything, différance and all that), Michael Vick's name should never, ever come up in our heads without a giant asterisk. And that's where the New York Times article fails. It turns that asterisk, that complicating factor, into a Herculean trial to be surpassed. And as long as that happens, these people will continue to get away with atrocity.

Wikileaks is Necessary

Sorry I haven't been posting very frequently; I have a number of different topics floating around that I've wanted to write about (atheism as a social movement, the racial effects of capitalism, a thought-piece about conceptualizations of American identity and problematizations therein via literary criticism and analysis, etc the list goes on) but I haven't been able to get around to them because of schoolwork. Anyways, the following is the text of a speech I gave on the floor of the Yale Political Union on Tuesday on the topic "Resolved: Wikileaks Should Not Have Published Classified Documents". I was the second speaker in the Negative, on the docket along with fantastic blogger, amazing speaker, and great friend Leah Libresco of Unequally Yoked. All names referenced herein are redacted unless the people in question would like their names reinserted. Enjoy! (For those interested: the resolution failed by a vote of about 28-35-2, if I remember correctly).

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I never thought I’d be on this floor following Mr. [redacted] after hearing him praise the value, power, and foresight of government – this is really new. Anyways, this is why Mr. [redacted] is wrong: in so saying that we can inherently trust people to filter and disseminate information that we “can handle”, he ignores the fact that everything has a political bias. This is no different for his lone editor or disseminator or government than it is for any of us in this room. So then, what we’re doing is handing the ability to determine truth to people that are already powerful; in a way, we’re practicing a bizarre kind of epistemological relativism wherein the people with the most money and the most guns get to decide what’s true.

This situation – where the powerful in society give an incomplete picture of events as they unfold to the people necessary for that power’s continued support – is exactly the type of thing Wikileaks is attempting to stop. Only by hearing the stories from those on the margins of our discourse, from those decentralized places that have neither interest nor duty in upholding the existing status quo, can we as the moral supporters of our government actually figure out whether we can and should support the things our government and our corporations do at home and abroad. Using Mr. [redacted]'s language, this comes down to transparency, and why it’s good for all of our sakes – because it means we can see all of the consequences that the moral and political choices that we as a people make.

Let me explain. The material on Wikileaks is targeted to a very specific audience. It’s not the terrorists; they don’t have much less of a habit for killing civilians than we do, and regardless of what a bunch of people posting classified documents do, they’re not going to be more or less likely to kill American soldiers, because in joining a terrorist group, they’ve already made the choice to do that. It’s not the Afghanis; most of Afghanistan (because of continued military occupation and rampant poverty) doesn’t have internet access and rates of computer ownership in Afghanistan is among the lowest in the world, besides that, they don’t need to read internal documents to know that US soldiers shot an innocent deaf and blind man down the street three years ago. Those documents on Wikileaks are intended for us, the privileged people sitting at home in America who make arguments that “we don’t kill civilians”, or “Pakistan is our ally in the region”, or that counterinsurgency is “working”, or that the war is “difficult but necessary”. The documents paint a cultural picture – one where what we’ve heard from the administration and military leadership about the progress of this war seems at best misrepresented and at worst an outright lie. Insofar as the release of these documents can change how we think about the war and our compulsion to support it, their release is a good thing.

But even further, the fact that Wikileaks is disseminating information that those with the greatest interest in maintaining and perpetuating the war saw fit to keep secret gives us the opportunity to see that perhaps the dominant narrative in our political discourse is not a given, and maybe even that the emperor in fact has no clothes. When we lose the opportunity to see information for ourselves, as Mr. [redacted] wants to see happen, and instead what we see are the same repeated analyses and moral judgements made over and over again, we tend to lose sight of how big this war really is, or that perhaps we don’t have any solid footing on which to stand in supporting it. What Julian Assange and Wikileaks did was actually raise the war as an issue to be discussed, even if only for a very brief time, instead of something lost in the background and dismissed as a necessary technical detail of our foreign policy. When we see video of soldiers in planes cracking jokes while shooting groups of people with precision bombs, or when we hear about the extent to which we have unmanned drones blanketing the skies above Afghanistan and Pakistan, it becomes very hard to just look away and dismiss all of that. Mr. [redacted] bemoaned the lack of sanitization of the scenes of war from coverage earlier. But, if images of piles of skulls filling ditches or corpses strewn across field are the consequences of war – and they are – shouldn’t we know about and see those things when we make the choice to continue waging wars? To some extent, we can change and modify our first principles and the things we support by being confronted frankly and honestly with the consequences of what we believe: this sort of discourse happens every day between members of this body. If we’re really comfortable as a people with letting loose the dogs of war and continuing to feed them for eight years on, then we should be able to look through our computer screens into the dead eyes of a young Afghani child killed in battle crossfire and say “I accept this cost.” If we do anything less, we’re not being honest with ourselves or paying fair tribute to the horrors we cause, and Wikileaks will continue to have a role to fill. I think that’s enough to vote in the Negative tonight.