Dear America,
The American obsession with sports is rather unbecoming, it seems to me. True, most of the western world, and now much of the eastern world as well, indulges in the skewed priorities that make sports front page news when the dozens of human beings dieing in the Syrian revolution every day barely get mentioned. But our affluence and the relative ease with which we get to live in this country seem to me to impose a duty to examine our priorities a little more carefully than does the rest of the world. After all, we presume to safeguard "freedom" and "human rights" all over, so shouldn't we be scrutinizing what we mean by that. Are we preserving the right to worship athletes and ignore the men with no legs who ride dollies in New York City...begging in the streets. Are we attempting to guaranty the right of every citizen of the world to maintain such loyalty to his local team in this or that sport that he is willing to fight when someone who favors another team so much as disparages the home team. Do we believe it to be the right of the citizens of every city to riot both when their team wins and when they don't. You'll notice that there are no question marks after those questions...which is because they are rhetorical. We do seem to regard those things as rights worth defending with blood, but of course we are not willing to go so far as to squander that blood and the treasure of our nation on athletic fealty...are we? That's the real question, and frankly, I'm not sure I know the answer to that one. Is sport that important to us?
It's been a depressing few months for sports fans in America, but it has seemed routine for the most part. No one got too excited when there were no nominations to the Baseball Hall of Fame because of the steroids that all the leading candidates used to gain their fame, but it did make the news. And while it smacks of confused priorities to me, the Lance Armstrong scandal got quite a bit of coverage, but perhaps justifiably. After all, Armstrong has thrived on the amazement he inspired in all of us for his recovery from cancer to win seven prestigious international sporting events...a feat achieved by no one else, and apparently not by him either if the rules make any difference...while he wrung from us our charity and good will, the former perhaps for noble rather than narcissistic purposes, but the latter not just out of narcissism but for shear filthy lucre most of all. Thus, he, like the disgraced baseball stars, deserves condemnation because of the panegyrics he shamelessly basked in all those years, so the coverage of their present ignominy may be appropriate. But now comes Manti Te'o...a barely post-pubescent moose of a kid who seems not to have the sense of a baby moose. He had a "relationship" with a girl he never met by speaking to her on the internet...and on the phone...for three years, and that, to him, made her his girlfriend. How he could be that easily satisfied in a real relationship I can't say, but then I don't know much about this story. I don't even know why it is a story much less one that we have heard more and read more about over the past month than we have about the Syrians...more even than we have heard about the hostage taking in Algeria during which dozens of people both good and bad, and some of them indifferent, were killed in retaliation for the French intervention in Mali where reactionary Jihadists are trying to take over the country. We've heard more about Te'o than we have about the debt ceiling or the Arab Spring that threatens to turn into the proliferation of some pretty anti-American, barbaric and uncivilized movements. Where has our perspective gone. Where is our sense of proportion.
After all, this Te'o story is about a kid with barely any common sense telling the sports media on the eve of a big game at Notre Dame that this ostensible girlfriend he had, though he had never really met her, had died, though he left the never-having-met-her part out. And always on the hunt for some dramatic human interest, these idiots in the press blew it up into a cause célèbre...the romantic loss of a possibly moronic gland case who just happens to be a savage on the football field; one more for the Gipper. In other words, the professional sports media were looking for a way to keep our attention focused on them and their work...because that's where the money is. And we have allowed it. As recently as last Sunday stories about this story appeared in the mainstream print media as this kid denied being part of what has turned out to be a ruse perpetrated for an unknown reason against a kid who is mildly famous because he can throw people to the ground with the best of the adolescents who play college football. Wednesday night, the truth about this non-event even qualified as a five minute or so piece of investigative journalism. It is a non-story about a nobody, and yet we can't get enough of it. My question is this. Why did this whole pathetic, trivial scam ever come into the spotlight?
The reason seems to be that we grown-ups dote on the kids who play games if they are big enough and fast enough, and we teach them at an early age that life is about them...a lesson that they absorb with alacrity when they are very young, and live afflicted with for the rest of their lives, even long after their salad days are behind them. We are a nation that rewards vanity and conceit with attention as we imbue our heroes with the perceived right to preen and strut, and exaggerate their own importance without perspective, ignoring the rules that bind the rest of us all the time. They in turn tell us about their imaginary girlfriends, swig down banned substances and lie to us about who they really are, all the while thinking it is their right to do so because we told them it was in light of how special they are. Of course, even complaining about all this seems disproportionate given it's lack of real substance, but it may be of some kind of significance in terms of what it tells us about who we have become. We are a nation that lauds pride as a virtue when for over a thousand years it has been a sin. We tout, admire and watch in awe those who are famous for little more than being famous and having outsized body parts, and all the while we begrudge the meager resources of those who struggle every day just to feed and shelter themselves, some of them working harder than any of those stars we so adulate, and contributing more to society as well. We characterize those less gratuitously fortunate people--or at least the Mitt Romney types and their supporters do--as takers because they need a little help, and because while we can afford to give it, we don't want to. The Republicans even feel entitled, now puling about The President's inaugural address because it didn't make any mention of mollifying them and seeking their approval and comity as if he didn't ask for it four years ago, only to receive their spite and obdurate obstructionism instead. We intervene all over the world with our military power, insisting that other countries see things our way and call it liberty, and then we wonder why so many millions--maybe billions--of people hate us. And here on our shores, we have people with assault rifles going into our schools and movie theaters and slaughtering dozens of people, some of them children, and we wonder why people who resent not having gotten enough of the kind of attention they feel entitled to do such things.
It's all part and parcel of the same phenomenon: that claim of American exceptionalism, both for America and for Americans. We think we're special both as a nation and as individuals, and we resent it when we are not treated as such. And what's worst about our own pride is that we never seem to question ourselves and one another about pride's connection to the things we condemn in others. Maybe we should look inward when we try to figure out why the world has gone so awry. Maybe we should ask Te'o for some guidance...on the nightly world news maybe.
Your friend,
Mike
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