My Cosmically Warped Priorities

(Written 8-27-11)

            As I sit here, a large tropical storm has left over one million people without power, and will almost certainly wreak considerably more havoc before unceremoniously slinking its way back out to sea like a frat boy silently exiting a dorm room he has recently trashed.  Thousands of miles away, a brutal dictatorship has recently crumbled, spurred by the bloodshed of citizens who no longer would tolerate the consequences of four decades of oppression, corruption, and poverty.  Elsewhere, a nation continues to battle its mounting debt, chronic unemployment, and a stock market with a schizoid personality that would make John Nash cringe.  Any of those topics could surely spawn tomes worth of writing.  But no, I’m left wondering when major league baseball will resume playing ballgames on the east coast – thus resuming pennant races, and more importantly, accruing statistics for my fantasy baseball team.

            In a world in which we are connected to information in so very many ways with instantaneous answers to our any and every question, we become equally detached.  The oddity, at least in my opinion, is the selective nature of our detachment.  Andy Borowitz, in a masterstroke of comedic brilliance quipped, “In America, we forgive criminals if they are good quarterbac­ks, and we treat bad quarterbac­ks like criminals.”  Of course we do!  Athletes aren’t people…they are merely entertainment objects whose physical skills allow for competitions with uncertain outcomes that can be tremendously compelling.  Are Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens really pariahs because they consumed a substance banned by their employers?  No…if that were true, the national consciousness would be filled with twenty-something cubicle-jockeys who smoked a joint on Saturday night and spent the evening watching adult swim, inhaling Doritos, and chugging a big gulp.  Barry Bonds might be a person to his family and friends – to the remaining 300 million residents of this nation, he is a part of the tapestry of a national pastime, a series of threads which has damaged the aesthetic appeal of the whole.  Michael Vick on the other hand, perhaps the inspiration for the quote above, became a person when he emerged from prison and asked for forgiveness.  Previously, he was simply some shiny fantasy football object whose ability to evade the blitz made for impressive highlights on Sportscenter.  

            To wit, think of someone you “know.”  Not someone you know intimately, simply an acquaintance with whom you’ve had more than a few conversations.  Ask yourself the following questions:  Where is this person from?  Where did they attend college?  If they are married, what is the name of their spouse?  Chances are, with 99% of athletes, you could not answer the first question or the third.  Moreover, unless their athletic skill brought them notoriety before attaining professional status, you cannot answer the second question either. 

            Mind you, I would never advocate that we should consider athletes to be human beings.  At that point, we would seriously need to consider the sense of keeping the company of angry, arrogant adulterers, abusers, and addicts.  Heck, I haven’t even explored the last twenty-five letters of the alphabet!  To value them as individual human beings would require us to reconcile their innumerable character flaws with their capacity to provide entertainment…and that would require a frontal lobotomy on my end.  Dorothy Parker once quipped “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”  I agree – give me a bottle and a ballgame, and blissfully divorce my thoughts from the flesh and blood creatures that play in them.