by Jim Miller
This suspicion of the crowd goes back to the father of collective behavior theory, Gustave Le Bon, a conservative whose fear of “the mob” was clear. According to Le Bon, the modern world was being taken over by the tyranny of crowds who were bent on replacing “the divine right of kings” with “the divine right of the masses.” For Le Bon, “by the mere fact that he forms a part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization.” By entering the crowd, he argued, we become “unconscious” and therefore subject to “contagion.” Crowds were, by nature, totalitarian because they murdered one’s individuality. While Le Bon’s ideas are still in vogue, they fail to explain differences in crowds (Woodstock versus Altamont, for example) and are fundamentally undemocratic in nature. Furthermore, the view that loss of self is inherently nihilistic relays a profoundly pessimistic view of human nature that lends itself perfectly to the culture of fear while ignoring the actual complexity of human collective behavior. “The people,” even Raider fans, are not, to contradict Alexander Hamilton’s views on the matter, “a great beast.”35
Another, more provocative, alternative explanation for post-event riots comes from French thinker Jean Baudrillard. Trying to make sense of the same soccer hooliganism as Buford, Baudrillard argues that “political, sociological or psychological approaches are simply not capable of accounting for such events.” The most significant aspect of the brutal events that resulted in the deaths of thirty-nine people at Heysel Stadium in Brussels in 1985, “is not their violence per se but the way in which this violence was given worldwide currency by television, and in the process turned into a travesty of itself.” This is because, according to Baudrillard, “Today’s violence, the violence produced by our hypermodernity, is terror. A simulacrum of violence, emerging less from passion than from the screen: a violence in the nature of the image.” Hence, Baudrillard, not unlike Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, who blamed “media hype” for the riots, claims that television’s “very presence will precipitate a violent event.”36
In Baudrillard’s estimation, post-event riots are not “irrational episodes in the life of our society,” but rather “something completely in accord with that society’s accelerating plunge into the void.” In a culture where “real events” have increasingly become mediated by the image, becoming part of the televised show has gained a quasi-religious significance. Thus sometimes fans follow the logic of the society of the spectacle to its logical conclusion. As Baudrillard puts it:There is another logic at work here, too, the logic of attempted role reversal: spectators (English fans, in this case) turn themselves into actors; usurping the role of protagonists (players), under the gaze of the media, they invent their own spectacle (which—we may as well admit—is somewhat more fascinating than the official one). Now is this not precisely what is expected of the modern spectator? Is he not supposed to abandon his spectatorish inertia and intervene in the spectacle himself? Surely this is the leitmotiv of the entire culture of participation.
By this logic, one witness of the riots, a high school student interviewed by the Oakland Tribune, had it right, “I think the media encouraged people, too. They wanted to put Oakland on the map. I guess people wanted to be on television.” Thus, not unlike people who will endure any humiliation to be on a reality TV show, the rioters were simply following the logic of our media-worshipping culture by doing anything to become part of the show.37
And let us not forget that we like to watch them. As Francisco Perez told a reporter on the scene as he videotaped the riots, “Man, this is memories, even though it’s a bad way.” Baudrillard observes that the ancients were more honest: “The Romans were straightforward enough to mount spectacles of this kind, complete with wild beasts and gladiators, in the full light of day.” Sports, he reminds us, “can be pressed into the service of any end whatsoever: as a parade of prestige or of violence.” Furthermore, Baudrillard contends, violent fans are only mimicking the “state terrorism” inflicted on them, “For there is also a willful pursuit of draconian policies, policies of provocation with regard to a country’s own citizens, attempts to fill entire sectors of the population with despair, to drive them to the brink of suicide: all of this is part and parcel of the policies of modern states.” Of Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister at the time of the slaughter at Heysel, he says, “She condemns [the fans], of course, but their brutality remains the very same brutality that she demonstrates in the exercise of her power.” One might have said the same of George W. Bush if he had taken time out from rushing to war and bankrupting the federal budget to note the events in Oakland.38
So what to do about out-of-control fans, who, as Baudrillard says, “carry participation to its tragic limit, while at the same time daring the State to respond with violence, to liquidate them”? How do we deal with gangs of fans blocking intersections chanting “Raiders! Raiders!” and marching headlong into a phalanx of police in riot gear screaming “Raiders rule! Fuck the police!”? Baudrillard reminds us of a soccer match played in September 1987 in a completely empty stadium in Madrid where “thousands of fans besieged the stadium, but no one got in.” Such punishment of unruly soccer fans, he argues, does much to “exemplify the terroristic hyperrealism of our world, a world where a ‘real’ event occurs in a vacuum, stripped of its context, visible only from afar, televisually.” Perhaps, for our protection, this will be our future, with “events so minimal that they might not take place at all—along with their maximal enlargement on screens. No one will have actually experienced the actual course of such happenings, but everyone will have received an image of them.” When one considers that the Raider rioters were already hundreds of miles removed from the Super Bowl and are economically excluded from regular attendance even when the Raiders are in Oakland, it becomes clear that they need to be excluded not just from games but from the “transparent form of public space from which all actors have been withdrawn.” Someone must keep them away from their television sets. Otherwise, they might take the advice of the wag on the Indy Media website who, responding to a post that characterized the rioters as “a bunch of bored kids,” advised: “Murder the organizers of your boredom.”39
River City Boosters
Three
We Are Everywhere
Last time I checked, criminals do not do charitable work for their respective communities.
Steve Lamoreaux, Raiders fan
Dear God
Could you please speed up time? Friday is coming soon and people on our Raider list are starting (ok constantly) to annoy each other. The only remedy for this is actual Raider Football. A thorough A$$ whoopin’ of the Lambs would be greatly appreciated so that maybe some sense of normalcy will return. Thank you.
Scott McCarroll, Raiders fan praying for peace on the
Listserve and conquest on the football field
Just Give, Baby
There was no “welcome home” parade in Oakland. The day after the 2003 Super Bowl nightmare, Raider Nation woke up with a hangover, licked its wounds, wondered what happened, and dreamed of next year. Fans on Oakland’s East 14th Street picked up the wreckage after the riots, others went to work in the East Bay suburbs, read the paper in Washington, D.C., checked the weather in Anchorage, got online in Manchester, England, or had machaca for breakfast and skimmed through a magazine in Mexico City. While the off-season certainly does represent a lull in the life of Raider Nation, the imagined community of fans does not go into hibernation altogether. In addition to fans in the Bay Area who may see each other in the flesh on a regular basis, the far-flung Raider diaspora goes to booster club meetings, attends occasional Raider events, and keeps the Silver and Black home fires burning online in the virtual Raider Nation.
On March 9, 2003, Bay Area fans held a raucous fund-raiser for the “Griz,” the fan who was the victim of a hit-and-run by an SUV after the Super Bowl. More than a hundred people showed up at the Long Branch Saloon in San Leandro and paid a $7 cover charge, ate barbeque, and dran
k beer to help raise money for Greg Jones’s medical costs. Banging their heads to live metal bands, or bopping along to rap and rhythm-and-blues acts, the crowd partied from one in the afternoon until two in the morning. Led by Rob Rivera and the Black Hole fan club, the silver-and-black-clad revelers (with some in spike-laden costumes) tailgated their asses off, altruistically. Jones, the injured insurance salesman, thanked the crowd gathered in the bar’s parking lot and told the Oakland Tribune, “We have a common bond. It’s something we’re born with. It’s in the blood.”1
Raiders fans’ charity activity extends well beyond Raider Nation. As booster club members like Larry Mastin of Vacaville explained to us, he and others send care packages to soldiers overseas. A veteran himself, Mastin remembers how difficult it was to be far away from home and how listening to Raiders games on the radio or reading about them in the paper brought him solace. “These guys appreciate anything that reminds them of home and being able to follow your sports team does that,” he told us. Steve Lamoreaux of the Carson City Raiders Booster Club in Nevada is also proud of Raiders fans’ communitarian ethos:Our club members (all 150 of them) function as a family and I am very proud to be a part of that family. Our club has also done tremendous things for the Carson City Community over the last 10 years. Same could be said about the other 40+ booster clubs around the country. Last time I checked, criminals do not do charitable work for their respective communities. I believe Raiders fans have been given the wrong image by other fans and/or the media.
Tony Lara of the New Mexico Raiders booster club also emphasizes his group’s good works and family values. “Our club is a family club,” he told us. “Our club is involved in many community projects. We have gotten a very good reputation for helping on many charity fund-raisers and other community events.”
Could this be true? Are all these do-gooders really bent on killing the Raiders’ outlaw thug image? Apparently so. The Oakland Raiders Internet Boosters Club has generously contributed to a long list of charities. Some of the beneficiaries of their Raiders love and compassion have included the Children’s Hospital of Oakland, the Women’s Recovery Association, East Bay Habitat for Humanity, and East Bay Outreach Project, among many other groups. In addition to the Internet Boosters’ efforts, another group of fans, the Skeleton Crew, buys tickets for poor kids who can’t afford to go to Raiders games. Even the Malosos So. Cal. Raiders Booster Club with their menacing helmeted skull logo and tough guy image have a charity drive for an orphanage in Tecate, Mexico, with Malosos members heading down to deliver food, blankets, toys, “and a smile” to less fortunate kids.
What these activities illustrate is that the imagined community of Raider Nation has a life independent of football. Rather than simply functioning as sad bogus substitutes for “real” community, Raiders fan communities have, in some cases, turned their efforts back toward civic engagement. While hardly utopian in nature, these efforts do reveal a yearning for community that has survived the atomization of the postmodern era.
Virtual Raider Nation
While some fans devote themselves to charitable works and booster club activities, others feed their off-season hunger for the Raiders by taking to the Internet. Sometimes full of love and humor, other times seething with hatred or overcome by paranoia, the virtual Raider Nation helps form the glue that holds the imagined community together. Through things like Raider fan radio, fanzines, websites, chat rooms, and Listservs, fans can communicate with each other, debate football, flame one another mercilessly, give advice, discuss politics, share opinions about music or film, and argue over Al Davis’s various legal battles. As David Rowe has pointed out, the Internet has allowed “the passive sports media consumer” to become an “all powerful media auteur.” Fans can rearrange pre-existing materials, write their own texts, set up forums, arrange events, and network with other fans on the local, national, and international level. Completely independent of the Raiders organization in most cases, Raiders fan sites are a kind of do-it-yourself media world where fans rather than corporate elites determine the content.2
Raiders fan websites run the gamut of tones and styles. Many of them are football-only sites and post articles, statistics, and other Raiders news. Others, however, are more colorful, complete with animation (such as a cartoon Al Davis toasting the Black Hole with a foamy beer mug), theme songs (like “Raider Nation” and “C’mon Raiders”), video hookups, chat rooms, and a complex network of subject areas and links connecting the user to related Raiders sites or Silver and Black shopping opportunities. A tour of the highlights of the virtual Raider Nation starts for many fans at www.Raiderslinks.com, a site maintained by Peach that provides links to a wide range of Raiders-related websites. Peach’s site has been visited by close to 200,000 fans since 2001 and lists most of the best but not all of the more than 100 Raiders websites, which range from Pirate Saq’s Pirate Ship to Tufty’s House of Pain.
Perhaps the most professional and comprehensive of the Raiders sites is “Nicole’s Silver and Black Attack” at www.silverandblackattack.com. Maintained by Nicole Joyner, the daughter of former Raiders defensive back L.C. Joyner, Nicole’s site provides the Raiders fan with a solid team history from the Raiders’ dismal beginnings at Kezar Stadium, Candlestick Park, and Frank Youell Field through the team’s glory years to the present. Here curious fans can learn that Western movie star Randolph Scott is rumored to be the face that inspired the Raiders pirate. They can also read about the history of the Raiders theme song, “The Autumn Wind,” which is narrated by the former voice of NFL films, John Facenda. A list of “Raiderisms” explains to the novice that fans call the Coliseum “the House of Thrills” rather than “the suits’” favorite, “The Net.” This section also decodes Raider nicknames like “Rainbow” for Lyle Alzado with his steroid-induced mood swings and “Horse face” for much-hated former Bronco quarterback John Elway. The best part of the “Fan” section is the map of Raiders fans that pinpoints the location of selected fanatics in all fifty states, Canada, England, Australia, Belgium, Costa Rica, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Poland, South Africa, and Spain. If an intrepid fan is hungry for controversy, Joyner has included an analysis of the personal seat license/attendance/lawsuit fiasco that is filled with intelligent commentary.3
Other websites of note include Darth Freeman’s Christian Raiders Page, which hosts a list of Christian Raiders from around the nation, Darth Raider’s page and Darth Raider’s Fan Galaxy, both of which feature fans dressed up as Darth Vader of Star Wars fame and lots of cool space graphics and Raider links. Raiders ’Till Death is Big Cory’s “clean and sober” site, which features a menacing picture of the Grim Reaper and BlackHole Mike’s Raiders for Life, which greeted the visiting fan with a swirling Black Hole graphic and a cartoon figure who dropped his drawers and peed on a 49ers logo (BlackHole Mike has meanwhile got religion and changed his site). A fan interested in still more Raider Nation craziness might head to the Raider Shack, where “Raider bones” will take you on a virtual tour of his house, complete with musical accompaniment. Then you might surf by the Bad Boys of Football, where a skeleton gives you the bird, before heading over to the Darkside. Not for the timid, the Darkside features gothic-style graphics and a thorough fan photo gallery as well as a “Hall of Vanquished Foes” featuring “cybersluts” and “cyberskanks.”
As Robert Putnam has observed of virtual communities, “because of the paucity of social cues and social communication, participants in computer-based groups find it harder to reach consensus and feel less solidarity with one another.” The result of this is that “participants in computer-based settings are less inhibited by social niceties and quicker to resort to extreme language and invective.” This observation certainly applies in virtual Raiderdom, where posters on the Raider fan mailing list, Fans in Black, and elsewhere are far more likely to “flame” a fellow fan in a chat room than they would be to curse a fellow fan at a tailgate or in the stands. Consequently, reading
Raiders cyberchat is at times a brain-numbing endeavor that requires you to sort through a myriad of petty insults and hateful vulgarity in order to read something about football. If the two years we spent lurking on Raiders sites on a daily basis is any indication, Putnam is clearly right that “cyberspace represents a Hobbesian state of nature, not a Lockean one.” Neither an isolated “cyberghetto” where all interests are monolithically shared, nor a democratic “cybercommunity” based on an ethic of reciprocity, virtual Raider Nation is an anarchic free-for-all where the lack of physical proximity changes the rules. Thus, not just homophobia and sexism, but also racism and a whole plethora of other ugly aspects of Raider Nation’s political unconscious surface on the Internet along with denunciations of such bigotry and genuine expressions of fellow feeling and solidarity. It is also important to note that the virtual Raider Nation is probably not different from the rest of cyberspace in that a kind of cyberapartheid exists, with more white and middle-class fans online than working-class or African American or Latino fans. Hence, it’s likely that the foul-mouthed virtual thug assaulting your masculinity is not a genuine street tough from East Oakland but rather an overweight, middle-aged Willie Loman computer geek from Red Neck, Arizona.4