Many people who work in sports get kind of itchy about criticizing billionaires. I’m just as itchy the other way; I can’t believe what they let slide.
I’m years behind Oprah and the Pulitzer committee, and maybe the last person to read Barbara Kingsolver’s 2022 novel Demon Copperhead. The writing is majestic and fun but the story’s an absolute nightmare, more than 500 pages of profound grand-scale suffering. As Kingsolver tells it, Lee County, Virginia, a part of the world once known for coal, comes to be a place where damn near everyone is hooked on pills or worse.
We learn all about it through the eroding dreams of a boy named Demon.
There’s a legacy of coal. One of Demon’s father figures dies with a body broken down by mine work decades earlier, most of his generation is laid off once the mines automated. Nobody in Demon Copperhead has a good word about the coal companies.
Except a middle schooler named Bettina Cook. Kingsolver writes:
One girl’s presentation she called “The Other Side of the Coin.” This is flippy-hair Bettina Cook with her posse of gal pals and her dad that owned the Foodland grocery chain, seven stores in the tristate area. Packed-lunch sandwiches with the cut-off crusts that flabbergasted me back in third grade, yep, same Bettina. Her family on her mom’s side were major shareholds of the Bluebonnet Mine. She passed out brochures on all the good the company has done for Lee County in the way of town park benches, etc.
Her great-grandfather won an award from the governor for buying one of the biggest coal veins under Kentucky and figuring out how to pull it out of the ground on the Virginia side so they didn’t have to pay some certain tax. She had a slew of relatives that were senators and such in the State House, that she showed us pictures of on her computer. Yes, her own computer, brought from home. Also a Motorola phone. Queen Bettina, we all knew she operated at her own level.
Most of the students only knew stories about mines leaving people injured, dead, or unemployed.
Bettina was like, Get real, you all, companies are in business to make money, that’s just a fact. The facts being, there’s hardly any coal jobs left around here. Bettina also said there’s no such thing as unemployed, just not trying. Her posse all stuck up for her side, and other kids said city people were the problem, for bad-mouthing coal.
Then the teacher, Mr. Armstrong, talks about how a select few sometimes get to shape the whole world, and we should notice the choices they make.
What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going to the mines. Not just here, but also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, those counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms and the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.
How many stories are there about coal miners (and their daughters)? Ordinarily the general memo is simply that life is hard AF and it takes tough people to make it through. Self-reliance is the remedy.
But along comes Mr. Armstrong, a middle-school teacher from fiction, asking us to peek at the other side of the “other side of the coin.” Think like a monopolist. It’s tough to get people to work in mines when they have the things the founding fathers envisioned: the pursuit of happiness with real options and intact American dreams. (Sierra Farrell grew up a few hours away and wrote a song called American Dreamin’, with the lyric “I'm American dreamin', oh-whoa, but I never seem to get no rest.”)
Pop the balloon of the American dream, though, and the mining business looks better, with wages low enough and profits high enough you can afford the friends and family members you need in high elected office to smooth things over if you ever get in trouble.
After the tidal wave of mining crashes and recedes, the pharma companies take their turn in fictionalized Lee County. A nurse practitioner named June has seen the crisis up close, and saves a lot of her ire for her ex-boyfriend, a drug rep who made his money telling everyone that this new pain medicine would not addict you. Now he was gone and there were massive lines outside the pain clinic and damn near the whole county had lost hope.
At one point, her adoptive daughter has fallen in with a drug dealer and gone missing. June’s hoping Demon can help find her. Kingsolver writes:
She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines. They actually looked up which doctors had the most pain patients on disability, and sent out their drug reps for the full offensive.
They did this to us, June explains to Demon. You understand that, right?
At the time Demon’s a rising star of the football team, which is the pride of the county and one of the only sources of optimism. Demon gets angry:
The trouble with learning the backgrounds is that you end up wanting to deck somebody, possibly Bettina Cook and the horse she rode in on. (Not happening. Her dad being head of the football boosters and a major donor.)
Bingo.
And that’s why we’re talking about Demon Copperhead in a sports publication. We can see how it all works, now, right? Run your business in a way that destroys lives and it might make you a tad unpopular. But: pour money into sports, and you confuse the issue a little, just enough to sap the will of the people to run you out of town. Can you imagine how fast they’d tell Demon to shut up if he started pointing out the flaws of the guy who pays for the uniforms?
Sports have maybe always been a way to buy hearts and minds. The emperors of Rome built the Colosseum in no small part to quell an uprising. We can’t give you a good life, but check out this stadium! Hitler and Putin put a lot of stock in the Olympics.
But that middle school teacher Mr. Armstrong is wise to it. His message stays in a tight circle thanks to a few thousand dollars for football uniforms, and the mining family can seem to be more about park benches and grocery stores than intentionally crushed dreams.
What industries most benefit from poverty? ChatGPT says the answers include businesses that pay low wages (fast food, gig workers, warehouses, call centers); sub-prime lenders and check-cashing places; for-profit prisons and detention centers; pharma and booze. ChatGPT didn’t mention gambling, but there’s evidence it belongs on the list.
Private equity invests heavily in all of those categories generally, and has used many of the proceeds to fuel a major run-up in sports franchise values. To my knowledge, NBA billionaires are active in almost all of those categories too. If, like Tom Gores, you’re gouging prisoners and their families for profit, the Pistons might do some important work in making you look cool.
I haven’t read Megan Greenwell’s book on private equity yet, but I’d add that that industry could have far more blood on its hands. For most of my life I suspected that a huge percentage of Americans lacked health insurance because it’s hard to get people on the same page.
My view evolved when I listened to Josh Harris, billionaire lead investor in the 76ers, Devils, and Commanders. Steve Forbes asked Harris why the world needed this alternative asset class of private equity, when there were plenty of competent investors ready to manage money by buying stocks and bonds.
Harris had a fascinating answer: health care costs. Health insurance costs had been reliably skyrocketing for ages in America. Big teacher pension funds had to pay those bills for their members. That meant they’d have to take bigger bets on riskier investments. “Firemen, policemen, teachers,” Harris explained, “they want to be able to count on getting their benefits.” Many teachers unions give their money to Apollo Global, where Harris worked, and which was founded by Leon Black, who funded Jeffrey Epstein. That same Apollo is also a massive source of the riches that purchase NBA teams.
Private equity honchos are among the biggest political donors on the history of planet earth. At one point I looked through the public filings of Leon Black’s political donations, but then stopped because it was so boring. He seems to give just about the maximum allowed to just about every elected official. And, related or not, those elected officials have succeeded in not delivering the healthcare that would do wonders to reduce American misery, but would also remove a key reason for the private equity industry to exist.
Some industries profit from misery. The teachers need benefits! So we all need private equity!
As I have been reading Demon Copperhead, and marinating in the community-wide desperation, I’ve also been thinking about how that tilts the world in favor of sex traffickers. According to several published first-hand accounts, Ghislaine Maxwell found some of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims by driving to parts of Florida where $200 was enough to turn many a local teenager into a willful repeated Epstein victim who might even recruit her friends.
The people of Lee County talk themselves into being OK with their local billionaire. Fans of every sports team are used to doing the same. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a fan of a particular NBA team, and you’re probably used to talking yourself into your billionaire being kind of OK.
I’m not here to tell you that I know a better way. But I also think it’s important not to be naive. Turn on your inner Mr. Armstrong. Don’t just ask: am I OK with my billionaire? Also ask: What does this billionaire want from sports?
And then notice that the big money coming into sports is from places with leaders who are not at all keen on democracy nor the ideas of the founding fathers. Anyone who has seen Hamilton will know what kind of a trick it is to get Americans to cheer for a king–it’s exactly what we’re allegedly against–but thanks to the overwhelming psychic power of sports, people run around in jerseys with words like Emirates and Saudi Aramco across the front.
Demon Copperhead sketches out the risks of letting that muddy thinking out of hand. What cracks me up is the author’s last name: Kingsolver.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!