Le Sequoit

Off With Their Heads

More resembling something from Aristophanes than an imitation of Roman decorum, the Senate is once again lecturing others about the awesome responsibility inherent to being a role model. I’ve written about this before.

Well, Henry the Horse keeps dancing the waltz around the American ideal as leaders take time out from their busy schedule of hissing and spitting at each other for a little recreational lashing out at someone else.

About a hundred or so unfinished projects ago I started writing a little one act about the previous Senate steroid hearings. I never finished but here’s a sample:

Son of George Allen

It’s high time the children of America learned that there
are no short cuts to success

Son of Sununu

Here! Here!

ESPN held a panel discussion this week—a kind of town meeting type of thing—about the state of NCAA sports. How seriously these world of athletics notables seemed to take themselves! I just wanted to reach into the screen, grab any panelist by his/her shoulders and scream, “It’s just a game!”

Maybe it started when they began putting names on the jerseys, or maybe it was the advent of ESPN, but fandom has come to fill a more compelling role for the American male than escape or heroic association. The saga of sports has become the man’s soap opera.

Having little interest in the art form in general, it will never occur to most men that it is really, really bad soap opera. These characters are just not that interesting. Interviews with athletes are about as enlightening as Leno’s man on the street stuff. And there are so many of them!

Living in the Chicago area and being a Bulls fan, I must have seen a thousand Michael Jordan interviews. I don’t remember a single thing he ever said. This is a role model? Life is to be an endless stream of clichés? Be like Mike and never, ever utter an original thought?

So our esteemed Senators are wasting our time capitalizing on the attention grabbed by a creep like Jose Canseco. While the real tragedy goes on in high schools, colleges and minor leagues, pundits fill the airwaves with laments over the sanctity of records of men like the exemplary binge-drinking Babe Ruth.

Does anyone remember the “silent game”? We have the technology now to imitate very closely the experience of the fan in the stadium. No discussion of so and so’s contract problems, no comparisons of end zone demonstrations, no interviews with general managers, and no moralizing by washed up jocks.

Just the game.

And fresh air.

posted by sequoit @ 3:55 AM