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Sports fans everywhere believe that superstars and marquee franchises are granted special treatment by the league. Every superstar, that is, but the one on your team. That guy is always getting the shaft.
This week, when disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy accused refs of fixing games, it precipitated an outpouring of conspiracy theories on sports radio and elsewhere.
Who could argue? The fix is undoubtedly in. How else could the San Antonio Spurs, playing in the vaunted 37th-largest media market in the nation, have won three championships in the past five years?
Today, despite being blessed with more transparency in government, business, media and sports than in any time in history, everything, it seems, is rigged. Lurking behind every corner is The Man. You are a victim of forces beyond your control.
When your candidate loses an election, someone must have tapped the voting machines. When you take on a loan you can’t afford, it was a predatory banker’s fault. If Taco Bell claims its quadruple-fried- and-wrapped taco is a must, how can anyone expect you to resist?
You know why these things happen? The media. This corporate-controlled plutocracy has abdicated its moral responsibility to report on the issues that you’ve deemed truly worthy of coverage.
Now, those who point out that the United States is blessed with more choices, voices, viewpoints, mediums and ownership in journalism than ever before . . . well, they’ve probably been bought by someone.
After all, corporate monopolies deliberately sell shoddy toys aimed at killing children and distribute poisonous tomatoes for kicks. Oil companies have the power to fix prices in a huge fungible multinational market. Such a surreptitious plot has not been seen since the Elders of Zion.
Those inept politicians we mock seem to have little trouble pulling the wool over the eyes of a couple hundred million people. It must be all those Rasputins, otherwise known as the lobbyists. How can you be expected to vote for the worthy candidate when the wrong candidate has more time on television?
Indeed, our government can pull off mind-boggling feats of evil. A well-known Scripps Howard-Ohio University poll claims that more than a third of Americans suspect that the U.S. government was somehow complicit in 9/11 terrorist attacks so it could go to war in the Middle East.
Educated, successful, open-minded people I might trust to watch my children and mingle with at dinner parties (as long as the grub wasn’t genetically modified by overlords of multinational corporations) believe we now live in a perverted Amerikka. An Amerikka where trilateral commissions and North American unions are conspiring with the Mexican government — which couldn’t run a lemonade stand properly — to snatch U.S. sovereignty while we’re busy watching reruns of “Sex and the City.”
Speaking of illegal aliens, you all know what happened in Roswell, N.M.? According to a Harris poll from 2005, nearly one-third of Americans believe in UFOs. In Denver, a new ballot initiative might create the Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission to handle alien encounters (which would instantly become the most productive government-run agency in the nation).
It’s possible that a large number of us have always believed in conspiracy theories. There is a crumb of truth in most, after all. The Internet allows these people to meet, and anonymity allows rumor-mongering to thrive.
On the other hand, with the mass of information available, tinfoil hats aren’t necessary.
And the NBA? A conspiracy? I wish. Perhaps then my New York Knicks (playing in the No. 1 media market in the nation) wouldn’t be suiting up the most hideous and inept team in the history of mankind. Scratch that. The worst team in the history of the entire galaxy.
Reach columnist David Harsanyi at 303-954-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
