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“Some dream about money; sweet, dripping, like honey.” - Jenny Bruce

The impending demise of the Big XII conference has filled me with a BP-style-flood of thoughts and feelings. Here’s where I explore some of them. (Our era’s seeming obsession with inviting strangers into our personal worlds is definitely a little weird, undignified and probably childish. But I must be honest: I can’t call it entirely meritless, given that our society seems designed to promote neuroses yet I’m too poor for a psychiatrist and too atheist for confession in church.) Oh, I shall also attempt to logically prove the concept of greed. And now, having made my level best attempt to warn you away, let’s proceed.

. . .

During the past week, I’ve been thoroughly captivated by this disgusting, fascinating soap opera known as “conference realignment.” There’s a disaster-unfolding attraction, truly. Some people are transfixed by volcanoes, or by oil spills, or by hurricanes; I guess this is my disaster.

As a disaster, of course, the disintegration of the Big XII conference is pretty harmless, admittedly, but perhaps that’s no bad thing. And either way it offers a Byzantine complexity. LeBron Watch, by contrast, is ultimately a one man show. Whereas the Big XII conference is by itself a web of grudges, secret agendas, shifting alliances, betrayals and what-ifs; double or triple that for the larger context of all the related Division I conferences.

None of this, however, would really mean a lot to me were it not on some level deeply personal: the high stakes game of musical chairs among athletic departments is all but certain to have significant, negative, consequences for my beloved Iowa State Cyclones. And that really, really pisses me off.

I won’t make the claim that it somehow makes me a “better person” but I don’t usually go in very much for tribal identity. At one end of the scale we’re all one species, and at the other very few people are looking out for me as an individual; most of what lies in-between is self-delusion. But in the case of dear auld ISU, I embrace the illusion anyway. Maybe because it was one of the very few places in my life where I ever felt like I really belonged in some way, maybe it’s just rebellion against the pro-Hawkeye culture in which I grew up; who really knows for sure. In any event, though the Alumni Association has trouble monetizing it, I feel a real and strong connection with the university and its teams.

And so it angers and upsets me to see ISU thrown under the god damn bus by the conference’s bigger and wealthier teams, particularly after those same teams have so often used the Cyclones as a cardinal-and-gold punching bag over the years. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as any surprise under those circumstances, but that doesn’t make it okay, any more than do Tom Osborne’s sickening crocodile tears as he collects Nebraska’s pieces of silver.

And the sell-out aspect of this farce, I think, burns me up just as much as the prospect of ISU being among those sold out. It also produces some terribly mixed feelings. As humiliating as it would be to see ISU abandoned in an unviable Big XII, as all of the heavy hitters sign lucrative deals elsewhere and force the Cyclones to go begging a place in some second or third tier conference, part of me wants to say “fuck it, let them go; good fucking riddance to those vile, rich bastards!”

Because, aside from the question of how much prestige there can really be in having your team physically broken by Texas or Oklahoma on a regular basis, this whole thing seems to take the greed-driven hypocrisy of Division I college sports to a new level.

Now, I am well aware that, as gratifying as it was to my sense of bitterness to read Iowa State President Geoffrey’s lament that “the future of college athletics appears to be less about academics and competitive success and more about money, as measured by television viewership and the associated revenues,” that train really left the station some time ago. And, of course, it may be objected that I’m just whining, and would easily rationalize all of this had I attended one of those vile, rich bastard universities rather than perennial underdog ISU.

Though I wouldn’t be too sure of that; if I haven’t demonstrated a deep capacity for dissatisfaction by this point in my life then either I haven’t been trying hard enough or you haven’t been paying attention. In any event, just look at this and tell me that it isn’t simply fucking sick: Division I athletics revenue.

I realize that big numbers are everywhere these days, and one shouldn’t immediately get freaked out by anything with seven or more figures. But come on. Eighty-seven fucking million dollars? For one goddamn officially-amateur sport at one school, played by unpaid student athletes???

Supposedly America can’t afford sustainable energy, a clean environment, better infrastructure, good public transportation, health care for all or higher education which doesn’t leave the average student saddled with a crushing debt burden… but we can find $87 million for Longhorns football? Something is seriously fucking rotten in the state of Denmark; for Denmark, read this country. It’s honestly more than a little questionable that ISU football rakes in $21 million with a fan base that’s scarcely more than alumni and people living within ten or fifteen miles of Ames; the crazy amount of money finding its way into college sports as a whole, and particularly the big football programs, is just plain fucking deranged.

For fuck’s sake: as even presumably-cynical sports writers have felt the need to ask, what the hell good does all of this money even do? Does it really make the games more entertaining? Consider that Iowa State’s hockey team plays at a “club” level, and presumably operates at a fraction of the financial size of the football team. But the hockey team is great, the fans are (unless something has changed dramatically in the past several years) a joyous, frenzied mob, and you can buy beer at the games. Which are quite affordable, to boot.

So part of me absolutely says “screw all of this;” who wants to be part of a moneyball league anyway, let alone one in which the playing field is always tilted against you?

But (you didn’t think it would be that easy, I hope) even going with that thought doesn’t really leave me much less bitter or angry, given the larger context which is unchanged, or arguably deteriorating. And not just the context of Division I college sports, but the context of an America getting worse and worse, in no small part through untrammeled greed.

Honestly, does present-day America have any values, as a society, other than getting as much money as possible as fast as possible? Along with, I suppose, a vapid, meaningless, famous-for-being-famous kind of notoriety? Is there anything else whatsoever? If anyone can offer something, by all means, point it out.

It certainly doesn’t seem like the almighty buck has much competition, at any rate. Though that, as a potential reason for alarm, is actually something of a tricky concept.

I’ve given a lot of thought to money over the years, as most people do I’m sure, though perhaps my musings have occasionally ranged a bit further than even the average broke, struggling young person in a society of big-and-growing inequality.

In some ways, the whole notion of fretting about money meaning everything to people has seemed somewhat dubious to me. Because if you think about it, it’s actually perfectly natural in many ways, as money is just a symbol. Very few people are interested in notes or coins after all; for most of us, the bulk of our money is entirely virtual, existing as nothing more than a collection of numbers. Money’s significance is in what it represents, and it basically represents everything.

Like it or not—and if one supports the freedom of consenting adults to make agreements among themselves I can’t see a fundamental problem with the concept—nearly everything is for sale. So money is, in a way, a shorthand for almost anything a person could want. I’ve concluded that there are probably just two main exceptions: 1) health; no matter how much money you have some diseases or injuries are incurable, and eventual death is unavoidable, though this may well change within the next century, 2) love; you can’t always purchase the behavior of other people let alone their feelings, no matter how much you spend, and even if one posits advanced technology and throws ethics entirely out the window, one still couldn’t purchase the genuine feelings of another person.

Perhaps history is a third item; I’m not not a big subscriber to the superiority of “pedigree” over “the nouveaux riches,” but I don’t think that tradition and legacy are entirely without value, and it’s probably fair to say that money can’t really speed up their creation past a limited extent.

Otherwise, though, money is a stand-in for pretty much everything under the sun, and far more convenient than a barter system, so why wouldn’t people want money? It can buy any material thing and many non-material things. There are, admittedly, some systems of belief which disdain the very concept of desire itself, but I don’t count myself among their followers. I actually think of my own outlook as being solidly materialist, to be honest, at least in the sense that this man was materialist.

And yet… I’m starting to conclude that it’s a bit more complicated than that. People want things, and know that they will probably want additional things in the future; money is a convenient way to stockpile credit toward acquiring those present and future things, ergo people want money. And yet… that explanation is only valid up to a point, I’m noticing.

For example, I know some people, we probably all do, who seem obsessed with accumulating money but never seem to enjoy it. Money can buy free time. So when someone hates his job yet works all the time in spite of having piles of money, and doesn’t seem to spend that money on anything else either, it seems like we’ve ventured beyond the limits of activity that my above reasoning can justify.

And then, of course, there are all of the people who literally have more money than one person could ever conceivably need within any realistic scenario, and yet still want more. Are still desperate for more. Not to mention studies that cast doubt on the belief that a materially-richer society is really consistently more happy than a monetarily poorer one.

Above all, perhaps, there’s the issue of narrow obsession. As noted, money can’t buy absolutely everything, and can’t buy much of anything if one doesn’t let go of a little of it. So the compulsion to grab as much money as possible, as fast as possible, and to keep as much of it as possible all to one’s self, does seem to raise legitimate questions after all. And alas, it seems to me, that compulsion is what’s driving a large majority of the decisions in American society today. In the Big XII, in congress, in the board room, in the voting booth; gimme gimme gimme mine mine mine now now now.

Yeah, money is great, I wish I had a lot more. But sanity still perceives reasonable limits; it may very well be that “to get rich is glorious,” but I have the feeling that “to become obsessed with grabbing as much money as possible as fast as possible, all else be damned” is ugly, and likely to lead to disaster. Both for individuals and for societies.

I cannot escape the impression that America is, increasingly, dominated by the same impulse that traps a monkey’s hand in a jar because it simply can’t let go, or think beyond the present moment, for even one second.