LoveMountains

July 04, 2006    The Charleston Gazette<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Julian Martin

·  Friends of Coal Bowl: Football helmets become ads for mountaintop removal?

They sold out cheap, really cheap. The coal companies, masquerading as a grassroots organization called Friends of Coal, bought each WVU-Marshall football game for less than two four-year scholarships for each school. It cost the coal companies the wages of about three employees to turn WVU and Marshall football helmets, with Friends of Coal logos, into moving billboards for mountaintop removal.

With WVU officials referring to football games as products and exalting that the Friends of Coal Bowl will enhance the coal industry’s “image,” it is plain to see where this branding of our football players is going. The coal barons have had over 100 years to develop a good image, but they must have failed if it still needs to be enhanced.

The coal companies must be losing the public relations battle in West Virginia or they wouldn’t be making this desperate attempt to foist their propaganda onto WVU football fans. A few years ago, the coal bosses admitted that 80 percent of West Virginians oppose mountaintop removal. To counter their bad reputation, they rolled out a public relations blitz and created Friends of Coal, an instant “grassroots” organization. Their billboards and radio and television ads try to convince us that destroying half a million acres of West Virginia mountains and burying a thousand miles of streams is good for us.

The Friends of Coal Bowl agreement allows the coal companies to use signs and the giant video boards inside the stadiums to promote their views on controversial issues. They are free to repeat one of their more ridiculous claims: that mountaintop removal makes the mountains better and more useful; like claiming that cutting off your arms and legs will make you better and more useful.

Imagine the nightmare if every WVU football game is sold to corporate sponsors: For two more scholarships, logos are plastered all over the players’ uniforms a la NASCAR drivers. Even cheerleaders, coaches and referees are included in the tacky parade. The huge video screens, which cannot be turned off, blast out corporate propaganda that polluted air, water and land are good for your children. Mountaineer Field becomes one big advertising venue and is renamed each game for the corporate sponsor. Could some bowl games be named for Friends of Clearcutting, Friends of Smog, Friends of Toxic Waste Dumps, and Friends of Adult Sex Shops? Logo-clothed cheerleaders chant “Tear down the mountains, dump in the creeks, beat the hell out of Pitt!” and “Take the ball and run boys, give a good return for our dollars, while we scalp the mountains clean, boys, and flood the hillbillies out of their hollers.”

But imagine a pleasant dream: WVU and Marshall put education first. They use football games to tell the real story of coal in West Virginia. The football players, cheerleaders, coaches and referees wear symbols that honor the over 20,000 miners killed in state mines and the hundreds of thousands disabled by black lung and mine accidents. The video boards show re-enactments of the Battle of Blair Mountain, and news clips of the Farmington mine disaster, the Buffalo Creek flood and Sago. Green armbands are worn in memory of the dead mountains.

This Friends of Coal Bowl is propaganda, not education. The president of WVU should be ashamed of such blatant distortion of a university’s duty to tell the truth and to educate. A quality university would not be a willing agent of corporate public relations. But what can we expect, our WVU president is one of them, he is on the board of directors of Consol Energy. It is on the way to becoming a tradition, a previous president is on the board of Massey Energy.

My Mountaineers sold out to an industry that is destroying the reason for being Mountaineers.

Martin, a retired teacher, is a WVU alumnus and former assistant director of student educational services at the university. He is vice president for state affairs of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.

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