Editorial: All Star Tie Signals Decline of America
I stayed up to watch the All Star Game
last week and, as Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man said, "I’m not happy, I
don’t like things today compared to the way they used to be." Time
was when a baseball game was a competition, when the players came to play.
Nowadays, professional baseball players’ bodies have become so valuable
that they can no longer afford to put them at risk by playing professional
baseball, not even in the biggest game of the summer. Sure, the game
of baseball counts and the fans of baseball count, but not as much as the
business of baseball. That was the message we got from the All Star
Game and we’ve been getting a similar message from all angles lately.
This week I tried to watch the movie
Pleasantville on ABC, but there were so many commercials that it just wasn’t
worth it. I took out a Fisher 4-channel lab timer and, starting from
the end of one commercial break, I timed eight minutes of movie followed
by five and a half minutes of commercials. The business of television
counts, but the viewers? Ahh, they’ll never get tired of Jared, just
as Jared will never get tired of low fat, low grade deli meat.
After I gave up on Pleasantville,
I started thinking about how I don’t even bother trying to listen to the
radio any more because it’s more or less nothing but advertisements mixed
into a tight rotation of really irritating songs. It turns out that
the main reason radio is so bad is that the big record labels pay radio
stations to play whatever garbage they’re trying to sell. The reason
the songs are just as irritating as the commercials is that they ARE commercials:
they’re paid advertisements for bands that you don’t want to hear.
Where does that leave the listeners? As the REM song goes, "here’s
a truck stop instead of St. Peters, yeah yeah yeah yeah."
It’s not just the world of entertainment
where the fans are getting screwed. Investors, fans of corporations, are
getting screwed in the business world while the big-shot executives, suddenly
as timid and fragile as major league ball players, take the fifth and go
home with a pile of their company’s fans’ money—true All Stars.
In politics, the All Stars of Homeland
Defense are telling us that, just as playing baseball suddenly represents
a threat to baseball players, our liberties are a threat to our liberty.
And in local politics, the Chapel Hill town council has decided to boost
revenues by installing traffic light cameras even as their fans, their
constituents, threaten to boo them off the field.
Some of these problems are results
of greedy self-interest and some of them (certainly the All Star Game and
the traffic cameras) could be attributed to what the author of Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance calls "the tendency to do what is ‘reasonable’
even when it isn’t any good." The good news is that the customer
is always right and, in the end, the fans will have to be served.
Until then, your seat is behind a pole and warm beers cost six bucks.
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