Pinko Magazine Hedonism + Activism

Ruining your Superbowl right … about … now. This Sunday’s Superbowl halftime spectacular is sponsored by that venerable U.S. institution, Bridgestone/Firestone. (Wherever wheels are rolling, no matter what the load, the name that’s known is Firestone, where the rubber meets the road.) Unfortunately for Bridgestone, the rubber wouldn’t meet the road without the help of some enslaved Liberian children in backwater “rubber tapping” plantations. Ooops! From (I know, I know, get some other sources) The Nation:

Bridgestone Firestone … runs one of the world’s largest rubber plantations, in Liberia. There, in a structure akin to modern-day slavery, workers are shackled by a quota system that withholds pay unless a set number of trees are tapped each day. Firestone says this number is 650, but rubber tappers place the number at 1,125. It would take a tapper twenty-one hours each day to reach even the lower rate. This unattainable quota forces workers to bring their children to work or risk losing the meager daily wage of $3.19; children as young as 7 are working on the plantation.

First off, did you have any idea that rubber came from trees? I didn’t. The article notes a sweet irony too: NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is a board member of Action for Healthy Kids, which promotes the idea that “all kids develop the lifelong habits necessary to promote health and learning,” habits that obviously include reading, writing and squeezing potentially-toxic rubber-making sap out of trees for days on end without breaks or adequate food and drink.

The Superbowl is always bittersweet; its a fun spectacle and its exciting to watch both for the sport of it and the pop culture, corporate-greed bonanza. In 2005 I played a Super Bowl drinking game; my friend Cara had to drink at every “Tsunami” reference. She thought she was off the hook but they kept showing Bill Clinton and George Bush in the pressbox every time someone scored a touchdown. Clinton and Bush were America’s “tsunami envoys”so Cara was totally fucked.

I had to drink at any reference to overt patriotism, which basically meant drinking after every commercial if you really think about it. That’s also the year where I became convinced, in a substance induced stupor, that the outcome of the Superbowl was riding on me; that is, I could allow the cosmos to grant the Eagles a victory, but in exchange for the Eagles winning I would have to have a heart attack on my friend Ann’s balcony. After weighing the social, political and economic impact of a national sports championship on a working class city like Philadelphia (negligible at best, calamitous at worst once the inevitable rioting kicked in) I decided to live. Sorry Philly.

Anyway, this year you can add every reference to an enslaved Liberian child tapping rubber to your drinking game, which should be a lot of fun. To assuage some guilt and help some Liberian children, you can donate to the main group fighting Bridgestone — the International Labor Rights Forum. The extent of Bridgestone/Firestone’s human rights abuses kind of put “nipplegate” in perspective on the crisis meter though doesn’t it?

About The Author - Ben Wyskida is a writer, activist, conscientious hedonist and political communications strategist living in Brooklyn. - Visit Ben's site.