At first I thought it was a yuk. A Texas state representative by the name of Al Edwards introduced a bill in March that would put an end to “sexually suggestive” cheerleading. You mean they actually wear teensie skirts down there? And move their bodies? In public? Then I realized there’s more to it than the deadpan AP report suggested.
This is the kind of issue that becomes acetylene in the minds of those who are exercised about it. Raunchy rah-rah might seem small, but the symbolic portent is large; and it goes right to the fault line in the Republican base, the one between leave-us-alone libertarians on the one hand, and our-way-or-else religionists on the other. This divide has been much in evidence on the Rightist message boards. Libertarians smirked and sneered about the nanny state. Religionists invoked the Fall of Rome. Here’s one from Free Republic:
Sad to see so many “conservative” Freepers so enthusiastically support the live kiddy-porn shows that so much of HS cheerleading has become. No wonder HS kids are having mixed gender sleepovers at their parents homes while the parents thoughtfully spend the night away in a hotel so as not to inhibit the kiddos’ fun and games.
The history of Rome’s rise and fall should be ample warning, but not so many Americans are paying attention. Historically, as a nation’s moral standard declines so does it’s power and standing in the world community. At the accelerating rate the US moral standard has gone downhill since I was in HS, we should be in the 2nd rank of nations along with the UK and France in one or two more generations. May as well get used to looking up to Red China as now the world’s #1 superpower and avoid the rush later.
I don’t quote this to make fun of it. I actually think the writer has a point, though I wouldn’t have put it just this way. The problem is a strange disinclination, typical on the Right, to trace a problem like this back to all its cultural sources. Lib-wimp parents are fair game, whether or not they actually are involved. But money and the corporate marketplace — well, that’s free enterprise. Safer to stick with those degenerate libs.
I’ll admit that I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about cheerleading over the years (except to hope that the Boston Celtics don’t stoop to the cheesy NBA marketing device.) I guess I had a vague notion that things were pretty much where I had left them. Try-outs in the fall. Pretty ones make the squad. Lots of blonde and perk. Practice in the gym, a few routines, but mainly just jumping and cheering and having fun. Talk about out of it.
Cheerleading today is big. It’s like figure skating on a mass scale. Kids start at “state-of-the-art” training meccas at the age of four. Some 20,000 go to cheerleading summer camps. All this comes with the lure of college admission and even financial aid. The brochure for the Charlston Cheerleading Center in South Carolina asks, “Who better than college cheerleading coaches to help a cheerleader get into a college cheerleading program.” It continues:
“With friends and connections in the cheerleading industry and college cheerleading programs throughout the country, our goal is to help these kids follow their cheerleading dreams as far as it will take them. College cheerleading is the dream of so many high school cheerleaders, and a college scholarship is the dream of so many parents. With hands-on, current experience in college cheerleading and with [gym manager] Sara’s previous employment experience with the College of Charlston Financial Aid Office, we can help cheerleaders and their parents prepare for college cheerleading at all levels.”
These folks know how to bait a hook. There are national competitions at all levels, and rankings of college cheerleading squads, just as there are for the teams they cheer for. There’s a cheerleading supply industry, of which more in a minute. There are numerous associations, with such names as Americheer, Cheer Ltd., and Cheerleaders of America. These recently formed a National Council for Spirit Safety and Education, to provide “comprehensive safety training and certification programs for the educational development of cheerleading coaches and advisors.”
It is good to know that cheer in America is in such good hands. No question there is testimony here to the enterprising spirit of this country. The ability to turn cheering into a business on this scale is a form of alchemy — reverse alchemy actually, in that it turns the finer substance into the baser one. It’s a little creepy too, to think that we need all this bureaucracy, choreography and general rigmarole just to perform the natural human function of rooting for the home team. If America is remarkable for the ability to turn rah-rah into an industry, it also is revealing in the extreme that we feel the need to, and do it with such zest.
According to industry (the word does curdle in this context) lore, organized cheering began at a Princeton football game in the 1880s. The Official Cheerleader’s Handbook says the first one went like this: Ray, Ray, Ray! TIGER, TIGER, SIS, SIS, SIS! BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! Aaaaah! PRINCETON, PRINCETON, PRINCETON. It’s no worse than poetry I’ve heard at readings on New York’s Lower East Side.
The movement got a boost in 1919 when a cheerleader at the University of Kansas by the name of Shirley Windsor persuaded the chancellor to cancel classes for an hour to hold a pep rally. Shirley was a guy, as most were until WW II, when a male shortage created opportunities for women, much as it did in the factories.) The rally turned into a revival meeting. After half an hour of cheers, the 4000 students pledged sixty dollars each toward the building of a new football stadium. The message was not lost upon college presidents around the country. The ingestion of organized cheering into the big buck culture of college sports had begun.
The business side took off in the person of one Lawrence R. “Herkie” Herkimer, who is “world-renowned as the ‘founding father of modern cheerleading,’” according to the website of the Cheerleading Company, which he founded. Herkie invented the pom pon, which is the blossom of streamers that cheerleaders shake and wave during some routines. The intellectual property rights to pom-poms were the seed from which the company grew. It now has a 100,000 square foot factory devoted to making custom costumes for cheer leading squads. It sends out over 300,000 catalogues annually, and has over 150 representatives in the field. I’ve never built a business or anything else on that scale, and I have to admire someone who has. Cheerleader garb seems relatively benign, compared to a lot of stuff that gets made today, such as violent video games and engines of climate change called SUVs.
Still, I wonder. What happens to a culture when its enthusiasm gets packaged and regimented to this degree? What happens when teenagers get yet another competitive pressure point in their lives, and when girls in particular are reminded once again that in America, the face-and-body perfect is the most important thing? Might one result be the particular genre of cheering the prompted the Texas legislation?
The literature in this field is as upbeat as its subject, full of wholesomeness and a kind of cheery virtue. “By providing a positive environment in which we push our athletes to achieve nothing less than their best,” the Charleston Cheerleading Center says, “we want to develop our athletes as mature, well-rounded, disciplined people who face the challenges in their lives with enthusiasm.”
It seems not accidental that the cheering powerhouses are found in such states as Texas and Kentucky, where evangelical religion also is strong. The two seem to be fruits of the same psycho-cultural tree: the state-of-the-art cheering centers cousins to the mega churches with television ministries and oceanic parking lots that inhabit the same landscape. Both convert enthusiasm and loyalty into business. Both divide the world into us and them. They are subject to some of the same inner tensions too, involving the nature of evil, and the conflict between God and Mammon.
The obsession of the churches with matters of sexual probity is well-known. So too is the tendency of that which is demonized to become irresistibly attractive. Jimmy Swaggert was not the first to lust for that which he preached against, and to succumb to it. Newt Gingrich was not the first to commit in private the very act for which he persecuted another in public. With Newt it was a woman in the church choir. How much more psychologically revealing can it get?
The cheerleading business skirts the edge of some of that same dark territory. While I didn’t intend the pun, I’ll go with it. Do they really think that putting attractive young women in skimpy skirts next to football games is entirely different from putting them next to new cars? Do they really think that NBA teams have resorted to cheerleaders because fans appreciate their athletic prowess? I’m not questioning motives or impugning the whole business. I’m just stating the obvious. There’s a tease here, akin to the way a Dolly Parton teases the religiosity of country music even as she professes it.
Then you add the money. Since we are speaking of Christian churches and culture the teachings of Jesus have some relevance, and he was not equivocal on the point. The love of money is the root of all evil. That’s what he said. He told the rich man to sell what he had and give to the poor. He told his followers that they should neither borrow money nor lend it. There are honest preachers who try to follow the master into this tough territory, to the extent feasible in a money-centric age. I saw one on TV once — I wish I could remember his name — who warned his congregation against tax loopholes because they arouse an unhealthy concern for lucre. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, was the basic point. Caesar’s image is on the dollar bill, so pay your taxes and trust the Lord.
This is not the popular view. Mammon, reborn as “market forces” and “supply side incentive,” is worshiped with the same energy that his sexual counterpart is reviled. The churches themselves have become corporate enterprises and even media conglomerates. As I wrote this piece I received the new issue of Business Week in the mail. The cover story: “Evangelical America: Big Business. Explosive Politics.”
(On the same day, The Wall Street Journal reported on how Richard Scrushy, on trial in Birmingham, Alabama, for defrauding the HealthSouth Corporation of $2.7 billion, has mounted what the Journal called a “righteous rejoinder.” The former CEO is preaching in churches and appearing daily on a Scripture-based morning TV show; local ministers often go with Mr. Scrushy to court after the show. Their support has not been diminished by the money that Scrushy’s family
foundation has given to black churches in Birmingham.)
Herein lies the raw material of the alliance that political operators such as Ralph Reed have contrived between the corporate cortex of the Republican Party and the evangelical ground troops in the field. It always is easier to renounce the other guy’s preferred sin than your own. Pat Robertson can pronounce damnation upon two men kissing, without much grumbling from the congregation. But love of money? What are you, some kind of commie?
But such preachers know that sin comes with a price, and Mammon is not an exception. Where big money has gone in this society, a kind of low-grade prurience generally has followed, not least in the realm of entertainment. Have you noticed that on commercial television stations the female “news” personnel are not chosen solely on the basis of their knowledge of the Middle East? Of actresses and female singers, the point is so obvious it hardly needs to be made.
The impulse to commoditize affects everything it touches, the mode of selling as well as the thing sold. The “liberal media” is market media; what it shows is there because it sells. If you argue that Right Wing Fox sells too, please recall that Rupert Murdoch built his fortune in part by selling newspapers in England that featured topless young ladies on page three. In family papers. Think what Bill O’Reilly would say if George Soros had done that.
When the anti-raunch bill was introduced in Texas there were expressions of support from the industry side of the equation. J.M. Farias, owner of something called the Austin Cheer Factory, said that he welcomed the law. “Any coaches that are good won’t put that in their routines,” he said. “I don’t think this law would really shake the industry at all,” he said. “In fact it would give parents a better feeling, mostly dads and boyfriends, too.”
I’m sure he is sincere. I’m sure most of the people in this industry are sincere. They have a picture in their minds of good clean kids having good clean fun, and training with the same diligence and commitment as the athletes they cheer for. Often no doubt the actuality corresponds to the image, more or less. But once you turn cheer into a factory, and align it with the even bigger factory of organized sports, then you have set in motion forces that do not easily stop. If you want to know what sells, just take a look around. It’s not a secret, really.
And so the conundrum on the political Right: what to do when your Eden is invaded not by liberals who make an easy target, but by a commodity culture that does not? A poster to another message board put the problem this way. He was responding to a libertarian who said people should deal with these problems on their own, without the intrusion of the government.
“Society isn’t dealing with it. Go in a middle school and see how these 12- and 13-year-old girls talk and behave. Very few of them are mature enough to understand the consequences of careless sexual behavior yet more than a few are engaged in and many consider it because they feel surrounded by it. And in the midst of this confusion, you have cheerleading sponsors who are encouraging routines that are a mix between a pole dance, a lap dance, and a dirty dance — in the names of winning contests or prepping their girls to be high school cheerleaders.”
Sponsors? You mean it wasn’t Jane Fonda or Hillary Clinton whispering into those innocent ears? The writer continues:
“This is the problem that libertarian thought always runs into — we love the idea that people are free to make choices and accept the consequences of their choices and no one else has the right to dictate someone else’s behavior. But in social settings, these choices sometimes become compromised because of direct or indirect pressure — some of which may seem more significant than it is and some of which is actually significant.
“I wish I agreed with you that it is as simple as social laissez-faire; as the father of a nine-year-old I find it difficult to agree.”
Hold that thought. The writer is saying that we are not the isolated integers that libertarian market thinking posits. He is saying there is a “we” side to human affairs and that we are not just an agglomeration of self-interested little “me’s.” If that’s true, and if it’s true that social settings affect individual behavior, then the nature of those settings become a matter of social concern. And America being a commercial culture, then commercial arrangements become a matter of public concern as well.
I guess it’s a lot easier to be a libertarian when you are talking about some abstracted others rather than your own kids. Still, we all have our own path to truth; and if it takes soft porn on the sidelines to get some people there, so be it. Besides, regimented enthusiasm hardly seems a libertarian idea to begin with. It’s more a precursor to military statism if you ask me.
Say, wasn’t a certain high official in Washington a former cheerleader? Hmmmm. Got to think about that.