More on Michael Vick and his Legal Troubles

In The Nation's web-letter section , Dave Zirin replies to my post about his column on Michael Vick. In the nicest possible way, he suggests that I'm out of my depth in tackling a sports subject. He's certainly right that I'm no expert on sports or sports media. How big an expert you need to be in this case is another question.

Zirin's big point is that Vick and other football stars do not have the moral agency I attribute to them, because they come from poor backgrounds and have few alternatives : "Vick and others are free not to play professional football. They are also free to work in McDonalds, or go to a public school that treats them like prisoners."

That may be so. I wasn't condemning Vick for playing football, though, but for allegedly running a barbaric and illegal dogfighting business. What does dogfighting have to do with escaping from a life flipping burgers? Or -- Zirin's other distracting topic -- with the prevalence of sports injuries? True, as Zirin notes, there are greater evils in the world than animal torture, and animal torture does not exist in a vacuum: "We are carrying out two military occupations, spend $500 billion on "defense" and have over 300 million guns in circulation. It shouldn't surprise us that violent sports, from the NFL to Ultimate Fighting, find a wide audience. It also shouldn't surprise us that players in these sports engage in past times [sic] that one would deem anti-social."

Yes, yes: violence in, violence out. Not only am I not surprised that our warlike and violence-loving society produces lots of, um, violence, I've made the same point myself. But every now and then, a crime is so gratuitously horrible it stands out. To blame Vick's alleged crimes on society and outrage against them on racism feels like an evasion, like political boilerplate.

I do have trouble seeing sports stars -- zillionaires idolized by millions and held up as role models to children (and how idiotic is that?) --as mere victims of the system. To me they seem more likely to be testosterone-poisoned narcissists who think they can get away with anything, and often do. The celebrity culture of entitlement -- that's the system they operate in, not the Old South. It may be true, as Zirin says, that only poor kids become professional players, because the work is so hard and the struggle so great -- but whatever Vick's origins it's hard to see as a peon someone who is making $13 million dollars a year. As for racism , that may be true of the radio frothers-- maybe one day a white star will be accused of animal torture and we can compare the public response. But it doesn't describe me, or the many Nation readers who've written in to express their outrage.

If charging racism doesn't play at The Nation, you probably need a better argument.

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