Cold Shower 11: The United States of Anxiety

Cold Shower The United States of Anxiety
Volume I, Article XI

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years, he has been working and consulting in North and South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of eight books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.

Dr. Fisher, I am a sport’s fan, especially of basketball and the Chicago Bulls of the NBA. On my salary, I am able to attend only about two or three games a year. What I don’t understand is the attitude of some players such as Dennis Rodman. Thank God for Michael Jordan, that’s all I can say. My question is why do we have to put up with well-paid jerks like Rodman who ruin the game?

If I may paraphrase President Richard M. Nixon’s remarks when asked about President John F. Kennedy, I think many of us see Michael Jordan as the person we would like to be, while these other so-called “jerks” are the people with whom we can more easily identify. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be marketable. Take Dennis Rodman who makes a fetish (and career) of being weird to the applause of the crowd.

Michael Jordan, and others like him, is the product of spin-doctors, public relation gurus, and the careful orchestration of image-makers. Jordan is a commodity that sells, and so is Rodman. They are bookends of the public conscience. The ideal versus the real model of how most of would like to be. Jordan is not real, nor is Rodman. No one is as happy as Jordan, or as weird as Rodman. They represent projections of the United States of Anxiety. You may recall the pressure of their cages found them both abandoning and then returning to the cages of celebrity sport, Jordan to baseball and Rodman to hedonistic Playboy Club excess. In baseball, Jordan proved totally mediocre, while Rodman was a bore as a profligate. Both were treated as supermen of sport, only to return to the crown of their former achievements a step or two slower, and well past their prime.

Dennis Rodman, along with scores of rock stars, epitomizes the temper of the times. His body, like many entertainers in sport and music, is a walking billboard of his delights and pains, his tattooed conflicts and unresolved mysteries, with his hair the color of his preferred flavor of the day. Meanwhile, Michael Jordan is waxed lyrical to the point of suffocation. Rodman craves acceptance and is rejected with a vengeance. Jordan delights in attention and is deified as a role model. They personify the range of our love and hate, which as you can see is quite banal.

Rodman, once the league’s leading rebounder in his prime was given a six-game suspension without pay and a $20,000 fine for head-butting a referee. At a salary of $34.500 per game, that represented a combined fine of more than $200,000. Most fans could not fathom such a setback, but for Rodman, he just trolled along. He can make that up in one sitting for a television commercial, no sweat!

Jordan perhaps had no idea he was exposing the mystery of the misery when he said of his teammate, “A lot of what you see in Dennis is his image and persona, not the man.” Could this also be true of Jordan?

Rodman, I sense, is the perennial little boy most American men hold tenaciously to all their lives, and are perfectly willing to let him exhibit the pain and anguish of the United States of Anxiety as an entertainment, or not something to be taken seriously. Like most American men would like to believe, Rodman refuses to jump through hoops demanded by public relations; basketball is a job, not a way of life; he doesn’t have to be perfect, or worry about letting the group down. Rodman is seen as a free man. Jordan is seen as trapped in his celebrity with little freedom.

Jordan epitomizes control. Rodman embodies spontaneity. Which behavior more reflects the times? Would you believe neither? Both are acts on a synthetic stage. Jordan is master of a Teflon society not in touch with itself; Rodman is master of his private hell.

Listen to their interviews. Jordan speaks in platitudes the balm of an uptight society. Rodman listens and talks with his eyes in a language beyond words.

My sense is Rodman is not a jerk, but an intelligent man to lazy to release it into positive action. Jordan appears long ago to have tired of public adulation, and would just like to play golf and smoke his cigars. I see them both far more alike than different, and both quintessentially American. But don’t look for Rodman’s image anytime soon on a box of Wheaties.

In my youth, I played and loved basketball, but I never mastered the game as it is played today. It has become an art form played with such consummate skill and at such a level that it is beyond my comprehension. Jordan and Rodman, and many others like them, are artists and flawed human beings, who have good and bad days, peaks and valleys. We try desperately to make them into machines in the United States of Anxiety. Rodman gives us insight into our own concealed self-contempt, while Jordan gives us permission to deny reality. I am sorry you see Rodman as a problem and Jordan such a joy. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer puts it, “Study the way we play our games, and you will have an insight into our society.” In that sense, they may represent our magnificent obsession.

Copyright (1996) this and other such issues are covered in some detail in The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996), discounted at $12 including shipping and handling.