"The Clutch:" Five Books Illuminating America's Other Twin Towers

[Mel Brennan]

Looking to define "clutch?"


Well, one way is to look at the events of the night of 14 June 1998. In
a game many talking heads will forever argue should have been his last,
and with his beloved Bulls trailing by one in the closing seconds,
Michael Jordan stole the ball from Utah's Karl Malone, drove on
Malone's team-mate Byron Russell, stopped on a dime...


And did what he always does, pressure or no: he took the shot.
He hit the shot.
A game-winning shot.
A championship-winning shot.


Clutch: doing, when it's HARD, that which you do when it's EASY.


Be it Jordan, or Emmitt Smith, or Serena Williams or Reggie Jackson or
(gulp...this is hard...) the 2004 Boston Red Sox, we embrace fully the
concept of "coming through in the clutch," of being everything
you've claimed to be when it's hardest to do, in our conception of
American sport. In fact, we measure and judge sport leadership and
participants by that "clutch" standard.


In what way does the U.S. citizen, the U.S. government exemplify such
"clutchness" OFF the court, in the daily drumbeat of life and living,
in our current opportunities for global leadership?


One look at "The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib," by Karen
J. Greenberg, Joshua L. Dratel and Anthony Lewis begins to let us know.


Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says the work
"...may well be the most important and damning set of documents
exposing U.S. government lawlessness ever published," and I may
agree. I CERTAINLY agree with Brig. Gen. James Cullen when he submits
that "The memos and other material collected in this book reveal how
political lawyers in the Administration adopted an 'ends justify the
means' policy, and tailored their advice to justify torture and
avoidance of obligations under the Geneva Conventions." For
citizen-accountable governments like the U.S., the torture papers
represents some bastardization or perversion of that process by both
abidcation of best practice and endorsement of something else.


Something certainly not "clutch."


We can all observe the employment of Executive "ends justify the
means" rationale in the language Bush and Blair use to justify the
invasion of Iraq. Both leaders have submitted a number of times along
of the lines of 'Well, reasonable people may disagree as to how we got
into Iraq, but no one can say that the world isn't a better place
with Saddam Hussein out of power...'


Ends, justifying the means.


What Bush and Blair leave unsaid, and what MUST be said, is that this
mode of being in the world is in fact the PRECISE mode of operating
employed by individuals and groups who look to wage terror. Innocent
civilians die? "Who gives a damn," or "that's not important,"
terror-mongers might say: "the means serve a greater end."


We might want to consider the extent to which US/UK foreign policy
aligns so perfectly with terrorist thought/action; at any time, but
particularly at a time when we are claiming the OPPOSITE perspective in
terms of a so-called "clash of civilizations." For global observers,
U.S. employment of "ends justifies the means" thought and action makes
it HARDER, not easier, to distinguish between so-called "civilizations"
and barbarism.


Indeed, the more one looks at this way of being in the world, the more
one realizes that "ends justifies the means" thinking can ONLY end
in terror, because it is predicated upon a "might makes right" mindset;
it is only in extreme historical moments like that of 9/11 and its
aftermath (extreme for Americans, one of a spectrum of horrors for much
of the rest of the world) that this mode of engaging the world is even
allowed consideration by rational human beings and societies.


Extremes; yes, extremes in our OWN citizen-fear allow terror-aligned
thinking to manifest as well. We have lost, in horror, the Twin Towers
of our New York skyline and the souls who inhabited them at the moments
of their fall; yet another set of Towers remain: the Twin Towers of the
Future of America.


One Tower is built, layer upon layer, with takes on the Great
Conflicting Idea that America can both claim notions such as "the
greatest democracy in the world," and "the hope for freedom of
millions," AND reflect diametrically opposed truths such as those
disclosed in the memos of "Torture Papers." It is a Tower built of
words promoting the Dream of America while simultaneously undertaking
the oft-horrific Reality of America: acts encompassing America-style
globalization found in, for example, John Perkins' "Confessions of
an Economic Hitman."


In "Confessions," Perkins describes in detail thirty-five years of
American business and government collusion to facilitate the work of,
as Perkins puts it, "highly paid professionals who cheat countries
around the globe out of trillions of dollars."


This Tower is built upon a tragicomically faltering foundation of
hypocrisy, one perfectly described by a comic - George Carlin - as
"...the old American double standard of 'say one thing, do something
different'..."; an America less interested in promoting ideals and
the rule of law than promoting a system of wealth inequality only
bested in the developing world by Mexico (and one that,
wage/inflation-wise, has forced most citizens to make do with less and
less since 1973), while settling for an infant mortality rate double
that of Sweden and higher than Slovenia.


That's one Tower; one layered, built-upon conception of ourselves and
of America.


That Tower contests right now with another, wholly different one: an
America in self-conception and in local-to-global action found in works
like Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States :
1492-Present," where, through giving a voice to voices outside the
First Tower's conception of American self (and subsequent mainstream
media shaping of who and what is historically important), Zinn allows a
totally different America, one that's always been there and always
been crucial, to come into our awareness.


This Second Tower is built on knowing that the Constitution, the very
foundation of America, was one damn unique document for its time, maybe
for all time, even if it left out an equitable fulfilment of rights and
an affirmation of humanity to anyone who failed to be a landed white,
heterosexual male, yet it left many rights, for many people,
specifically uncodified and generally unconfirmed .


It's a Tower laden with sensibilities that differentiate between our
set of decision-rules (Constituting a democratic republic) and our
chosen economic system (capitalism), and, like Michael Albert, see an
America beyond such choice. In his work "PARECON: Life After
Capitalism," Albert offers up an America promoting ideals and values
such as "... equity, solidarity, diversity, and participatory self
management" as a way of life for Americans, and not just as
campaign-ad rhetoric. To fulfill the promise of those values PARECON
describes new institutions that will facilitate, among other things,
"...remuneration according to effort and sacrifice, and participatory
planning."


It's a Tower that, like Cornel West in his book "Democracy Matters:
Winning the Fight Against Imperialism," finds space beyond the dogma of
Christianity, Judaism and Islam to embrace progressive, prophetic
voices on all sides of the spirituality debate, and demands wholesale
rejection of "ends justifies means" fundamentalism, on all sides.


Indeed, these works help us see that the central thrust of this Second
Tower is of an America in the becoming, with law and love and sacrifice
as the forms of agency through which America gives itself the best
chance to become that which we claim it to be, at home and throughout
the world.


Engaging the Ideas of this Second Tower of American-ness means
acknowledging that the Great Experiment remains to be completed; that
its completion is a process of possibility.


A commitment to this Tower of American self-conception means coming to
see that the extension of the Constitutional franchise - again, a
document not specifically intended to encompass those different in
gender, race and class fro the Founders - comes from everyday people
getting in the streets and becoming willing to stand fast and sacrifice
everything they are for the truth that the Constitution, that America,
could and should represent everyone, especially when it's hard to do.


It comes from "stepping up in the clutch," for the nation, and for
the world, in hope and expectation that a land which always celebrates
and usuallly embraces the rule of law would eventually codify such
sacrifice in laws extending rights and affirming humanity, for
everyone.


From the Abolitionists, to the labor and child labor movements, to the suffrage movement, to the political rights and civil rights and Indian
rights and women's rights movements to the gay/lesbian rights
movement: none of these are naturally provided for in either the letter
or the interpretation of the Founding Document of the American nation.
Rather, the Idea behind such movements was that with the Constitution
as a basis, if we stood fast, stood courageous, in the streets for
those rights and in the courtroom (and the jail, and in the morgue) for
that change in the law, we would have a nation in practice like the one
in the American Dream.

Thus, we stood, generationally, in each historical moment, in the
clutch.
We took the shot.
And we made the shot.
Maybe not a game-winning shot, but the shot that keeps us in the game.


That's what that Scond Tower is about. And it contends, everyday,
with that first Tower, for the soul and substance of America.


The events of 9/11 reach out to this generation, to each American, as
we contribute to the building and affirming of one Tower or the other,
and each Tower rings back a substantively different response to those,
or any, attacks.


One says "yes, ends do justify the means," and keeps us duct-taped,
terror-alerted and afraid while telling us that just being afraid is
enough to justify anything to make us safe and make us win, whatever
"safe" ends up meaning, whatever cost is incurred in the "winning."


That Tower asks us to turn our backs on what we've claimed to be, in
the light of a New Era in violence and destruction, and submits that in
fact the only way TO survive on this New Earth is to become a New
America. To, in the most important of moments, avoid taking the shot
altogether. To take our ball and run home, and let our betters take
whatever shot deemed necessary for us, while we watch, glued, then
return to the court with a different ball and say "the game had
changed."


The Second Tower says that it's only in moments when we are afraid,
only when the right thing is difficult to do, that we can claim what we
are. That our Ideals, like friendship, suffer no test when everything
is hunky-dory, but rather when everything is going wrong. It's then,
and only then, that we discover that for which we are willing to stand.


In the clutch.


Mel Brennan is the American author (along with Grant Jarvie and Tony
Hwang) of "Sport, Revolution and the Beijing Olympics." Mel both
teaches sports studies and examines human rights in Olympic cities in
the pursuit of a PhD in Sports Studies at the University of Stirling,
Scotland, UK.

[Mel Brennan]

1. Okay...I guess...

everyone either read these works, discussed them fully already, or hates my style of presenting them...or all ofthe above :)