From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Turn Off Your TV: part 11
Date: 4 Jan 93 3:12:59 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

This is part of a series currently running in New Federalist 
newspaper.  For subscription information, please contact me by E-mail.  If you 
missed any of the earlier postings in this series, please contact me by E-mail
and I will send them to you. This series is also available by ftp from  
red.css.itd.umish.edu in the directory poli/LaRouche .

Turn Off Your TV--Part XI

The Making of Sports Into a Secular Religion

by L. Wolfe

Now we are ready to look at our national sports addiction--an 
addiction {pushed} through habituated television viewing--from 
another vantage point.

Let's set the scene, again.  It is the last game of the World

Series. The last inning, the last chance for the home team, 
{your team}, and they trail by one lone run.

Two men out. Men on second and third. A two-strike count on 
the batter. Another strike and it's all over. A hit will win 
the game. The camera brings you a shot of the pitcher, as he 
gets ready for the pitch. Another camera shoots the batter, 
as he cocks the bat, waiting.  The score, a reminder of the 
proximity to an outcome, flashes on the screen.

The palms of your hands are wet with tension. You think to yourself, 
``Come on, you can do it. Just a hit.  That's all we need.''

The pitcher winds, and as he does {you cross your fingers and 
say a little prayer}. The ball is delivered, and {you pray a 
little stronger, a little harder} in that instant before it 
arrives at its destination.

Now let's freeze that for a moment.

Who, or better yet, {what} were you praying to? To God, the 
Divine Creator of all the universe? Not really. A religious 
person would hardly think that God should waste his time on 
such trivial matters. A less than religious person would not 
think to ask for Divine intercession.

No, at that moment, in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs 
and two strikes, you were probably asking for help from {the 
gods}, those mystical forces who control the {Fates}, which 
we are told by those who study such matters, play such an important 
role in sporting contests.

The sports fanatic believes in such things as the {Fates} and 
the control of events by mystical forces outside the laws of 
the Universe. Sports and sporting events, in the minds of these 
fanatics, exist, to use a sports term, {out of bounds} of normal 
religion, and most decidedly {outside} Christianity.

The religion of sports is a {mystical cult}, based on the infantile 
emotions. It posits a universe outside that which is governed 
by the laws of the Universe that can be known by the powers 
of creative reason.  It is a cult which has its {rituals and 
celebrations of that which can never be known}. It teaches man 
that he is ultimately helpless against {the Fates}, the mystical 
gods of {irrational emotions}.

Judeo-Christian civilization has
taught us that man is made in the image of his Creator and that 
what distinguishes him from the animal is his power of creative 
reason. By that power, man can discover the laws of the universe 
and participate in the Creation.

Most importantly, all men are created equal--not in the corporeal 
sense that their bodies are equal, but equal in the {potential 
of their creative capacities} at birth. It is the responsibility 
of society to assure that each individual is given the maximum 
opportunity to fulfill that creative potential and thereby to 
contribute to mankind's search for perfection of its knowledge.

The {pagan cult} of sports preaches the opposite: Man is a two-legged 
animal, whose reason must ultimately fail him before mystical 
gods of fate, and who is driven by a brutish, animal-like aggressiveness.  
Such ``men'' are decidedly unequal, with some men created more 
equal than others as evidenced by the god-like athletes of the 
various playing fields.

While such views most clearly undermine Christian thinking, 
they are promoted by many sports ideologues as the celebration 
of the highest good of human culture: an organized, ritualized 
competition, in which men submit to arbitrary rules. This, we 
are told, represents the essence of human beauty and ethical 
conduct. American sports, we are told, as represented by the 
major spectator sports, are the best of American culture and 
contain all the basic truths that America needs to impart from 
one generation to the next.

Such a sports ideologue is Michael Novak, a failed seminarian, 
who has become a ``theologian'' within conservative American 
Catholic circles. Novak fashioned himself into an apologist 
for the degenerate American conservative culture of the Reagan-Bush 
years. Novak sees Anglo-American capitalism as the highest form 
of Christian culture and sees sports as a necessary component 
of that culture.

Given who Novak is, we shall argue that his thinking represents 
the outlook of that pagan, oligarchical elite responsible for 
your sports addiction. When he speaks of an {ethics} of sport, 
he is speaking of an Arisototelian ethics, a mere set of arbitrary 
rules and codes.  In his many writings, Novak alludes several 
times to his affinity for the work of Aristotle. Novak's repeated 
attacks on the concept of the {infinite} as being inferior to 
what he calls the {ritual limits} of sports are a denial of 
the possibility of the existence of universal truth.

Novak's views on these matters and his {image of man as an animal} 
are identical to those of the evil brainwasher Sigmund Freud. 
Much of Novak's theology of sports is derived from Freudian 
notions of repression and sex drives.

Novak's moral outlook is the same as that of the Spartan state, 
which also idealized and promoted sports and competition. His 
{mystical gnosticism} is akin to the outlook of the {Nazi state}, 
put into power by the same oligarchy that sponsors and promotes 
American sports, through its brainwashing tool, television.

Novak's 1975 book {The Joy of Sports}, from which we will quote 
extensively, therefore provides us with some insight into how 
your brainwashers and their controllers view the effect of sports 
on your mind and society.

A Secular Religion

In this book, Novak lays out the thesis that American sports, 
especially since its mass penetration into the population with 
the advent of television, have become a {civil or secular religion}, 
holding sway over the masses: ``In the study of civil religions, 
our thinkers have too much neglected sports.... Sports are a 
universal language binding our diverse nation, especially its 
men, together.  Not all our citizens have the gift of faith. 
The religion, even so, is an ample one, and it allows great 
freedom for diverse interpretations, and mutual dissents. Our 
sports are liturgies--but do not have dogmatic creeds. There 
is no long bill of doctrines to recite. We bring the hungers 
of our spirits, and many of them, not all, are filled--filled 
with a beauty, excellence, and grace few other institutions 
now afford. Our sports need to be reformed--{Ecclesia semper 
reformanda}. Let not too much be claimed for them. But what 
they do so superbly needs our thanks, our watchfulness, our 
intellect, and our acerbic love.

``The institutions of state generate a civil religion,'' writes 
Novak. ``So do the institutions of sport. The ancient Olympic 
games used to be both festivals in honor of the gods and festivals 
in honor of the state--and that has been the classical position 
of sports ever since. The ceremonies of sports overlap those 
of state on one side and those of the churches on the other.... 
Going to a stadium is half like going to a political rally, 
half like going to a church....''

But Novak is not saying that sports are mere {symbols} for religions. 
They satisfy ``religious needs'' of the masses of the population, 
needs which he claims the churches are unable to satisfy or 
at times even grasp: ``I am saying that sports flow outward 
into action from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious: 
an impulse of freedom, respect for ritual limits, a zest for 
symbolic meaning, and a longing for perfection. The athlete 
may of course be pagan, but sports are, as it were, natural 
religions....

``They do serve a religious function: they feed a deep human 
hunger, place humans in touch with certain dimly perceived features 
of human life within the cosmos, and provide an experience of 
at least a pagan sense of godliness.

``Among the godward signs in contemporary life, sports may be 
the single most powerful manifestation....  Sports drive one 
in some dark and generic sense `godward'....

``Sports are religious in the sense that they are organized 
institutions, disciplines, and liturgies; and also in that sense 
they teach religious qualities of heart and soul. In particular 
they recreate the symbols of the cosmic struggle, in which human 
survival and moral courage are not assured. To this extent, 
they are not mere games, diversions, pastimes.... To lose symbolizes 
death, and it certainly feels like dying, but it is not death.... 
If you give your heart to the ritual, its effects on your inner 
life can be far reaching.''

Novak sees sporting contests as teaching man of the existence 
of death through the concept of {losing}. In assigning such 
importance to death, Novak is mirroring Freud, who argues in 
several locations that life is the struggle between two opposing 
instincts, Eros, or the sexual drive for perpetuation of the 
species, and Thanatos, or death, a drive toward man's own destruction. 
The death instinct, claims Freud, is diverted from the individual 
toward the external world, and manifests itself as human {aggressiveness 
and destructiveness}--two qualities of the {human animal} which 
Novak says sports ``joyfully'' celebrate!

The New Priesthood

Arguing against a concept of sports as {mere} entertainment, 
Novak says that the relationship between the individual fanatic 
and the athlete is psychologically the same as that between 
a priest and his disciples. But the priesthood being described 
is a {gnostic and pagan} priesthood, not that of Christianity. 
The priests are elevated into a god status: ``Athletes are not 
merely entertainers. Their role is far more than that. People 
identify with them in a much more priestly way.  Athletes exemplify 
something of a deep meaning--frightening meaning, even....

``Once an athlete accepts a uniform, he is in effect, donning 
priestly vestments. It is the function of the priests to offer 
sacrifices. As at the Christian Mass, in athletics the priest 
is also the victim: he who offers and he who is offered is one 
in the same. Often the sacrifice is literal: smashed knees, 
torn muscles, injury-abbreviated careers. He is no longer living 
his own life only. Others are living in him, by him, with him.  
They hate him, they love him, they berate him, they glory in 
him. He has given up his personal persona and assumed a liturgical 
persona. That is, he is now a representative of others.  His 
actions are vicariously theirs. His sufferings and his triumphs, 
his cowardice and his courage, his good fortune and his ill 
fortune become theirs. If the Fates favor him, they also favor 
{them}. His deeds become messages from the beyond, revelations 
of the favor of the gods....

``Being an active player is like living in the select circle 
of the gods, of the chosen ones who act out liturgically the 
anxieties of the human race and are sacrificed as ritual victims. 
The contests of sports ... are the eucharists.''

Novak is describing {cult} practices, and he knows it: ``A religion, 
first of all, is organized and structured. Culture is built 
on cult...''

Americans, Novak writes, have little connection to the Renaissance 
traditions of European civilization and the values it places 
on man and the power of creative reason. Turning our Revolution 
on its head and ignoring the Declaration of Independence, he 
claims that America was born not in rebellion against the British 
Empire, but against {the Renaissance tradition of man}. As such 
we need a new ethos and have found it in sports: ``The streets 
of America, unlike the streets of Europe, do not involve us 
in stories and anecdotes rich with a thousand years of human 
struggle. Sports are our chief civilizing agent. Sports are 
our most universal art form. Sports tutor us in the basic lived 
experiences of the humanist tradition.''

Having broken with that Renaissance tradition of man created 
in the living image of God, Novak says that sports present the 
true image of man: an aggressive beast, the most powerful and 
pernicious of animals.

``The human animal is a warlike animal,'' he writes. ``Conflict 
is as near to truth about human relations, even the most intimate, 
as any other feature. Sports dramatize conflict.  They help 
us visualize it, imagine it, experience it....

``Play [as in sports] is part of the human beast, our natural 
expressiveness. It flows from inner and perennial energies, 
and needs no justification....''

Football, for example, teaches reality in a way that no church 
or Renaissance thought can, Novak claims.  It shows us that 
``human life, in Hegel's phrase, is a butcher's bench.  Think 
what happened to the Son of God, the Prince of Peace; what happened 
in the Holocaust; what has happened in recent wars, revolutions, 
floods, and famines....

``What is human?'' asks Novak.  ``What has human experience 
been in history? A fully humanized world, gentle, sweet and 
equitable has never yet been seen on this earth.... One of [football's] 
greatest satisfactions, indeed, is that it violates the illusion 
of the enlightened educated person that violence has been or 
will be exorcized from human life....''

Thus, Novak is telling us that sports teaches us that man cannot 
perfect his existence beyond that which is most animal in him, 
that the best that can be done is to celebrate his animal nature 
as his {Aristotelian true self}: ``There is no use despising 
part of our natures. We are of earth, earthly; descended, so 
they say, from other hominids; linked by neurons and cells and 
organisms to the teeming chemical and biological life of this 
luxuriant planet. We are not pure minds, nor rational animals, 
nor separate individuals.... We are part of the earth. And sports 
makes visible to the human mind the great struggle of being 
and nonbeing that constitutes every living thing....''

Here, Novak displays a Freudian disdain for the Judeo-Christian 
concept of {imago viva Dei}. Freud states in {Civilization and 
Its Discontents}, that Christians, in particular, behave like 
``little children'' who refuse to face a harsh ``reality,'' 
when ``there is talk of the inborn human inclination to `badness,' 
to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as 
well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection; 
nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the 
undeniable existence of evil--despite protestation of Christian 
doctrine--with His all-powerfulness or His all-goodness.''

All Men Are Unequal

Since it teaches us that man is nothing more than an aggressive 
animal, Novak claims that sports also {must} teach us to discard 
as meaningless the concept of all men being created equal; it 
teaches the precise opposite, he claims.

The athlete, especially the professional, is clearly not the 
equal of the average man: He is a superman, a godlike figure, 
with qualities that the average man can only dream about:  ``Life 
is not equal. God is no egalitarian. Prowess varies with every 
individual.''

Aristotle, says Novak, teaches us to perceive value and beauty 
from this inequality. On this basic and fundamental principle 
of {human inequality}, says the pagan Novak, all sports and 
all life are premised.

Men are not equal, according to Novak, nor are they capable 
of loving humanity. Sports teaches, he says, that aggressiveness 
and the drive for dominance are the most basic of animal-like 
human instincts. In life as in sports, love, especially Christian 
love or {agape@ma}, hardly matters. Certainly such a universal 
concept does not provide us with motivation to live a certain 
kind of life, Novak claims.

``But we are not infinite... The human imagination, heart, memory, 
and intelligence are finite. The nature of the human psyche 
is to proceed from what is close to us outward; we cannot without 
self-deception begin by embracing everything. To claim to love 
humanity is to carry a very large and thin pane of glass toward 
a collision with someone you can't abide.''

Here we find Novak in total agreement with Freud. In his {Civilization 
and Its Discontents}, Freud argues that the concept of universal 
love, on which Christianity is premised, causes a neurotic distortion 
of Eros, the libidinal instinct of man. It does so because it 
is based on a false and deluded view of one's fellow man: ``A 
love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part 
of its own value, by doing injustice to its object; and secondly, 
not all men are worthy of love....''

It is wrong ``to love thy neighbor as thyself,'' says Freud, 
unless there is some purpose as defined by Eros, for this. ``For 
my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring 
them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on 
a par with them.  But if I am to love him (with this universal 
love), merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, 
like an insect, an earth worm or a grass-snake, then I fear 
that only a small modicum of my love will fall his share--not 
by any possibility, as much, as by judgment of my reason, I 
am entitled to retain for myself. What is the point of a precept 
[love thy neighbor] enunciated with so much solemnity if its 
fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?''

But it is the Christian command to ``love thine enemies'' which 
Freud finds even more abhorrent to his brand of antihumanism. 
He recognizes that both commands emanate from the same principle: 
that man is more than an animal and and that he is governed 
by universal laws more powerful than his instincts. For those, 
like Novak, who attack this principle, Freud finds ``the element 
of truth behind all of this, which people are so ready to disavow, 
is that men are not gentle creatures that want to be loved, 
and who at most can defend themselves when they are attacked. 
They are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual 
endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.... 
Who in the face of all his experience of life and history, will 
have the courage to assert this assertion? As a rule, this cruel 
aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at 
the service of some other purpose, whose goal might have been 
reached by milder methods. In circumstances that are favorable 
to it, when the mental counter forces which ordinarily inhibit 
it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously 
and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards 
his own kind is something alien....''

As we have seen, this is precisely the view of Novak, who sees 
sports as putting man into contact with his true, bestial nature. 
For Novak--and for his oligarchical masters, the same people 
who promoted Freud and put Hitler into power--in sports one 
finds {negation} of the principles of Western Christian civilization 
and the {affirmation} of a pagan, gnostic religion based on 
Freudian concepts of the inate destructiveness of the {human 
animal}. To be a sports fanatic is to worship Novak's pagan 
gods of Fate and to {celebrate} what is {inhuman}.

A Pagan Rite

The word {fan} is derived from {fanum}, which is Latin for a 
local temple. To be a fan is, for Novak, to participate in a 
pagan rite of passage and sacrifice. He sees the process of 
{rooting} as putting man in touch with himself and his species, 
in a way that no religion can offer: ``A human goal more accurate 
than enlightenment is `enhumanment.' Sports like baseball, basketball, 
and football are already practiced as expressed liturgies of 
such a goal. One religion's sins are another's glories.  Some 
`enlightened' persons feel slightly guilty about their love 
for sports. It seems less rational, less universal, than their 
ideals; they feel a twinge of weakness. The `enhumaned' believe 
that man is a rooted beast, feet planted on one patch of soil, 
and that it is perfectly expressive of his nature to `root.' 
To be a fan is totally in keeping with being a man. To have 
particular loyalities is not to be deficient in universality, 
but to be faithful to the laws of human finitude.''

Much of this is restatement of Freud's analysis of mass phenomena.  
Freud too claims {rootedness} is a natural expression of man's 
basic aggressiveness. He likens it to ethnocentricity and xenophobia, 
which he claims reflect an instinctual identification with one's 
{own kind}. For Freud and Novak, universal man, the man of the 
Renaissance, is a neurotic. Man is more appropriately organized 
into animal-like formations, which act in their own, narrowly 
defined interests, rather than for the ``good of mankind.'' 
The emotions of rooting coincide with the desire to be loved 
in a mass. The psychosis produced, which Freud calls ``the narcissism 
of minor differences,'' becomes at once an approved outlet for 
man's basic aggressiveness, which one must be careful to regulate 
so as not to allow excesses in either the individual or the 
mass. While he is making a more general point, the applicability 
of such brainwashing formula to sports {rooting} is obvious.

Novak also ``warns'' that sports rooting can be carried to excess, 
which he cautions against: ``Of course, there are fanatic fans, 
fans who eat and sleep and drink (above all, drink) their sports. 
Their lives become defined by sports. So some politicians are 
devoured by politics, pedants by pedantry, pedarasts by pedarasty, 
drunks by drink, compulsive worshipers by worship, nymphomanics 
by phalluses and so forth. All good things have their perversions, 
good swollen into Good, idols into God. Every religion has its 
excess. Sports, as well.''

(One wonders whether Novak thinks pederasty ``good'' if not 
overdone.)

Undermining the Church

Novak sees the {pagan, secular religion} of sports as enhancing 
the other established churches, providing something that they 
do not.  But a {pagan religion}, whose teaching and practice 
is opposed to Christian doctrine, as he describes sports, can 
{only undermine Christianity}.

To be sure, sports and religion in America are wedded together. 
Churches sponsor sports teams, even offer organized prayers 
for the outcomes of important games. Perhaps the most famous 
of all football teams, the ``Fighting Irish'' of the University 
of Notre Dame have a loyal following in the scores of millions 
around the country and have made millions for the university 
in television monies each year. Novak himself commented that 
the most important thing that the University of Notre Dame ever 
did, its most important contribution to humanity, is ``the {myth 
of Notre Dame football.''}

The relationship between religion and mass spectator sports 
is that of a victim and a disease. It is a failing of the church--all 
churches--that they have not seen how sports has become a powerful 
counterpole to Christianity, one whose dogma is irreconcilable 
with Christian teaching.

Through mass spectator sports, our population is being brainwashed 
that man is an animal, that universal truth and love are meaningless 
concepts. A large section of our population is reduced to a 
state of infantile emotional obsession with the sports fantasy 
world, such that it is incapable of comprehending profound ideas. 
Our churches do nothing to fight this. As Novak says, churches 
have the ``good sense'' to have their Sunday sermons over in 
time to allow people to get to their television sets for the 
afternoon football games.

Some of you may argue with what we have just presented. I warned 
you that you would find some reason to disagree.  ``I don't 
buy this stuff about an addiction and sports being a pagan religion,'' 
I can hear some of you saying. ``I just watch it to be entertained.''

You may {think} that is the case. As we have said repeatedly 
during this series, the best brainwashing victims are those 
who most loudly claim that they cannot be brainwashed.

Think back to that example of the ninth inning of the last World 
Series game.  The last at bat, two outs: one strike and it's 
all over; a hit wins the game for {your} team.

The pitcher winds and releases the ball towards the plate. The 
batter cocks the bat. Your hands are wet with tension. You offer 
a silent prayer, thinking to yourself: {Please, just let him 
get a single. Please, that's all we need. That's not too much 
to ask}.

To whom did you offer that prayer, if not to Novak's {gods of 
Fate}?

``Ya gotta believe,'' was the rallying cry of pitcher Tug McGraw 
as the 1973 New York Mets came from way back to win the National 
League pennant, only to lose in the seventh game of the World 
Series. ``Believe what?'' he was asked. ``Just believe,'' he 
replied. ``Believe in destiny, in Fate. Just believe, without 
question, without thinking. Without any reason.  To {will} victory. 
That's the power, man. That's the force. That's our magic....''

Our boys were well prepared, ``Coach'' Schwarzkopf told us in 
the famous briefing on the Gulf War. They had the best ``gameplan'' 
and they executed it perfectly, he said, as we beamed our approval, 
as we sat glued to our television sets.

Was it a just war? Did we fight for a morally defined principle? 
And what about all those innocent women and children that were 
slaughtered in this ``best of all gameplans?''

``Who the hell cares,'' says the man watching the television 
set, his beer cans piled at his feet. ``We won, didn't we? That's 
all that counts. You know what they say about winning....''

Our brainwashed people, their eyes buried in their television 
sets, know little that cannot reduce to the rules of the {playing 
field}. As the statesman and political prisoner Lyndon

H. LaRouche has warned, a people so debased is in danger of 
losing the moral fitness survive.

The next time that you find yourself watching a sporting event 
on television, and you get that sense of being totally caught 
up in the {game}, remember what you have read here. When your 
hands start to sweat, when you find yourself starting to pray 
to Novak's god of Fate, try to {pull yourself out of it}. Go 
over and turn off that set. Believe me, you'll feel much better 
in the long run going cold turkey on sports.

And if you live with a sports addict, show him this article. 
Don't give in to his or her addiction. When you recognize the 
symptoms, go over and turn that set off. Be prepared to duck 
a flying beer can or two. But at some point, an {adult} must 
put his or her foot down.

The Cult of Physical Fitness

If sports, and especially spectator sports, have been turned 
into a pagan religion, then a large number of our fellow citizens 
are members of a {sub-cult}, the {cult of physical fitness}.

Let's be precise about what we are talking about. The human 
body requires a certain amount of {exercise} to remain healthy. 
To the extent that one is not hampered by illness, a {moderate} 
amount of daily exercise, in consultation with one's physician, 
is both useful and necessary to keep the body healthy and to 
deal with the stress of daily life. Such exercise is as necessary 
for the young as it is for the old, but again, the operative 
principal is the goal of maintaining a healthy and vigorous 
body. By so doing, a person maintains his body in a state of 
readiness to act as directed by morally informed reason.  In 
that sense, to be physically fit, is never an end in itself: 
it is subordinated to reason, and the program for fitness is 
so designed by reason.

A person who acts to keep his body as fit as is {reasonably 
possible}, who, if his or her daily life does not contain sufficient 
exercise, designs a {reasonable} exercise program, is clearly 
acting in his or her best interest.

From this type of {reasonable} physical fitness goal we must 
distinguish the current {obsessive neurosis} of many Americans 
with physical fitness. In these neurotic cases, physical fitness 
becomes an end in itself, severed from reason. One becomes {obsessed} 
with one's own body and the perception of that body as a manifestation 
of one's {identity}.

While there are examples from history of physical fitness being 
used in cult practices on a mass scale, such as in the Spartan 
state or more recently, in the Nazi state, the current fitness 
craze dates back no more than 15-20 years. It is intrinsically 
linked to the degenerate moral outlook of the so-called {Me-generation} 
of the 1970s, with its obsessive, infantile fixation on the 
gratification of sexual desires.

The emergence of the ``Me-generation'' is the result of the 
brainwashing--the first ``rinse cycle,'' if you will--of the 
``baby boom generation'' by television, as we have described 
elsewhere in this series. The concepts of morally defined right 
and wrong, the bedrock of western Christian civilization, were 
given a modern ``neo-Freudian'' twist through television programming 
and popular culture: It told us that we must have no {guilt} 
or {remorse} for our actions, even if they violated Christian 
morality. This {moral imbecility} lit the fuse on an explosion 
of hedonism.

The erotic component of that hedonistic explosion, pushed, in 
part, through the ``sexual revolution'' of the 1960s counterculture 
and its infusion in the popular culture, led to a fixation on 
the body as an expression of one's fundamental identity. Mass 
or popular culture had always ascribed a disproportionate value 
to how one looked, but now Americans were told that ``image 
is everything.'' The drive for an improved personal appearance, 
and enhanced carnal gratifications, pushed the Me-generation 
into their jogging shoes, onto their bicycles, and into fitness 
and health clubs in record numbers in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The key recruiter to the cult was television. From the 1970s 
through the 1980s, the fitness message was inserted into television 
programming. Stars of shows, including the daytime soap operas, 
were shown at fitness clubs, or jogging, or in some other form 
of exercise. There was a heavy sexual content to the message: 
Those exercising were usually dressed in revealing exercise 
outfits, and clubs and other places were shown as a place to 
flirt and attract members of the opposite sex.

The association between sex and exercise was made early on in 
the creation of the craze with the promotion of the now-famous 
and enormously profitable Jane Fonda ``workout'' videos. Fonda 
is credited with recruiting more males to the fitness cult than 
any other person; marketing studies show that her videos, as 
well as the other exercise videos which, like hers, feature 
women in tight-fitting and revealing exercise clothes in various 
provocative positions, sell in huge numbers to middle-aged men. 
As one reviewer commented, such videos represent ``socially 
acceptable pornography.''

But more was being ``sold'' than cheap voyeurism. The fitness 
cult has helped with the promotion of the {disease} of environmentalism 
within the American population.

From the beginning of the 1970s, television and other media 
associated ``fitness'' with the concept of man, as a part of 
nature, being in harmony with the laws of the kingdom of {Nature}: 
all members of the fitness cult were ``initiated'' into regimens 
of ``healthy diets'' and spiritual concepts relating to ``natural 
ways of living.'' Perusal of any of the many fitness magazines 
reveals articles with this message.

The not-so-hidden message of such magazines and related television 
programming and advertising was that man did not have dominion 
over nature, but that he was merely ``nature's steward.'' Nature, 
or so we were told, dominated man, and if its laws were not 
obeyed, even in the realm of the body, man would pay the price 
with his ``health'' and ``wellness.''

(Before some of you jump down my throat, let's again clarify 
that we are not talking about medically proven facts about healthy 
eating habits or moderate exercise programs, conducted under 
supervision of doctors; we are dealing with {obsessive behavior} 
and are here talking about an {ideological outlook} that became 
a justification for that obsessive behavior. So stay in your 
seats, will you, and read on.)

According to this {spiritual} message, exercise brought man 
into closer communion with his {animal} nature; this was even 
said to have a ``therapeutic'' effect on man's consciousness, 
giving him a sense of inner peace. In the counterculture of 
the late 1960s, this same nonsense was contained in the preachings 
of ``holistic medicine,'' ``transcendental meditation,'' ``EST'' 
and other cults. The operative concept was a ``high without 
the drugs'' or a ``natural high.'' This was being played back 
in a slightly altered context, winning some old and many new 
recruits.

By identifying man as part of nature and by focusing him on 
his least-human aspect, his corporeal body, the proponents of 
the fitness cult created people with sympathy for environmentalism. 
Television programmers inserted characters into shows who are 
both fitness nuts and radical environmentalists.

At first, the ads and the television shows imprinted these images 
subtly, through the infusion of shots of people on bicycles 
or jogging within other action or with people eating ``healthy'' 
cereals, etc.

Now, the message is more literal.  Ads openly pitch to this 
fitness-environmental market: ``I exercise to take care of my 
body. I eat the right food. And I want to make my town environmentally 
safe for my children,'' says a young mother in an ad for a laundry 
detergent in a crushable, recyclable container. That string 
of predicates seems totally ``natural'' to you, doesn't it? 
That's how well brainwashing works.

It works so well that most people don't even remember that they 
used to associate Jane Fonda, prior to her workout videos, with 
the word ``kook'' or ``nut'' for her various leftist or environmental 
stands in the 1960s and 1970s. She's still a nut, but a recent 
survey found that most people now associate her name with ``exercise'' 
or ``fitness.''

Pain and Agony

As we said earlier, a properly defined exercise regimen can 
help an individual maintain his health. More often than not, 
for a member of the physical fitness cult, an exercise program 
driven by {infantile} obsession with one's body and appearance 
can be destructive to one's health; it can even threaten one's 
life.

Doctors involved with sports or fitness related medical practice 
have noted a large number of debilitating and even crippling 
injuries directly attributable to obsessive exercising.  They 
note that in the last few years, the numbers of such injuries 
are rising.

In many cases, typical of obsessional neuroses, the individual 
{cannot} stop exercising, even when injured, even when he is 
told to by doctors. The person is driven by the obsession, which 
overpowers his reason.  The similarity to a ``programmed'' brainwash 
victim has been noted by some clinical observers. In the worst 
cases, those obsessed with their exercise are unaware of their 
destructive behavior, and even when it is pointed out, cannot 
halt it themselves.

But lest someone say that these are only extreme cases, the 
majority of those involved with the fitness cult suscribes to 
the oft-repeated credo:  ``No Pain, No Gain.'' While this {masochism} 
has been soundly denounced by medical authorities, it has been 
reinforced by popular culture, including television programming.  
According to one doctor, ``Nothing we say seems to matter. People 
believe what they see and hear on television.  They believe 
that people should exercise beyond the point of physical breakdown 
and pain.''

Pain is often the subject of boasts and discussion among members 
of the cult. Even agonizing injury becomes a cathartic experience, 
to be greeted with both sympathy and awe by the cult members.

In part, this fixation on pain reflects the mass brainwashing 
of the population around the Freudian concept of the {pleasure 
principle}:  that pleasure is inexorably linked to unpleasure, 
and that a pleasurable experience is merely the absence of unpleasure 
or, in this case, pain. By this twisted logic, one derives pleasure 
from the end of a painful experience; hence, the pain {leads} 
to one's pleasure.

This outlook has its political and economic correlative in the 
demand for economic austerity and suffering. The same kind of 
Freudian logic is summarized in the famous call for sacrifice 
of Lazard Freres's ersatz Hjalmar Schacht, Felix Rohatyn; the 
choice, he told New Yorkers during the New York City bankruptcy 
crisis of the mid-1970s, was between ``Pain and Agony.''

But the problem is even worse than that. The cult of physical 
fitness, or more precisely one of its subcults, is going to 
kill or physically destroy millions of our young people.

Over the last half of the 1980s, there has arisen a vast teenage 
subculture driven by an obsession with the size of muscles and 
``pumped up'' with bodybuilding drugs. Experts who have profiled 
and studied this trend estimate, on the conservative side, that 
there are {at least} 5 to 10 million young people involved with 
this obsession. Of that figure, somewhere between 500,000 and 
1 million adolescents are involved with the use of black market, 
or illegal, steroids.

The numbers are even more startling since recent widespread 
publicity campaigns have identified steroid and other bodybuilding 
drug use as potentially harmful and even fatal.  Studies have 
shown that the majority of users do not dispute the medical 
claims. They are using the drugs anyway, and even welcome the 
perhaps fatal outcome. The credo of this {death cult} is ``{die 
young, die strong,}'' according to a recent article in {U.S. 
News & World Report}.

In part, this usage is attributable to images in recent popular 
culture of ``pumped up'' heroes, such as Rambo or Terminator, 
as well as football players and others, with their enormous 
paychecks. But these images alone, and their mass-brainwashing 
effect, cannot explain the existence of this cult. The deeper 
psychological impetus for this phenomenon lies in the {infantile 
nature} of adult society as a whole, with its own obsession 
with {physical fitness} and carnal desires. It is not the drugs 
that drive the obsession, but the other way around. The obsessive 
behavior of the youth mirrors adult society, with its own {infantile} 
desires for gratification of the flesh, at the expense of creative 
reason, and as a subfeature of this, a fixation on sports and 
the human body.

In our youth, that fixation leads to a destructive {narcissism}, 
with a focus on the size of the body muscles. It starts with 
an insecurity about one's body; it is followed by an attempt 
to correct this insecurity through regimens of weightlifting 
and diet. But when that fails, and the insecurity continues, 
the drugs become an alternative.

In the case of young athletes, the hyper-competitiveness of 
high school and other organized sports creates the insecurity 
that drives this cycle. The driven athlete turns to drugs as 
a performance enhancer or to ``bulk up'' to meet the challenge 
of intense competition. It must be stressed, however, that the 
majority of steroid users are white, middle-class males who 
{have never been} serious about an athletic career and more 
than one-third have never even been on a high school team.

It had been hoped that publicizing the dangers of the drug use 
would deal with the problem. It appears instead to be having 
an opposite effect. The athletes who have used steroids have 
merely become ``anti-heroes,'' who are revered by the hard-core 
of this {death cult.}

The growth of this subculture has been promoted vigorously by 
the mass media, especially television. One of the most popular 
shows among young adolescents is {American Gladiators.} It features 
competitions among ``pumped up'' men and women in tests of endurance 
and strength in a futuristic setting.

Adolescents are the largest number of 7 million regular readers 
of so-called muscle magazines, as well as wrestling magazines, 
which are promoted through television advertising. This same 
age group helps make huge box office successes of movies featuring 
``pumped up'' heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, 
and Jean-Claude Van Dam.

Again, it is wrong to look at those figures and conclude that 
such programming is {only} directed at kids. The Me-generation, 
now middle-aged adults, also watch {American Gladiators} and 
go to see the Terminator movies or rent them for home viewing. 
There is no possibility of breaking this subcult in our youth, 
without adults breaking from the much larger, but equally mentally 
destructive, physical fitness cult.

Think about that as you leer at your next exercise video or 
watch with great interest those commercials for various health 
foods. Try to imagine what the {next} generation is going to 
be like--or, if there is going to be a next generation, at all.

That's all for now. When we return, we'll talk to you about 
Satan's own television network, MTV, and what it and similar 
fare are doing to our children.



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         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com