Jeremy at Parableman has an interesting take on sports in our society vis a vis Ayn Rand’s dismissal of them as an utter waste of time. Now, I’ll concede right up front that as a society, we do waste a whooole lotta time on sports. I mean, just today, I had to get on one of my kids because I’ve heard him spittin stats in a Kobe vs. AI discussion, but he cant remember the password for his email account for my class. I had to call him on it. At any rate, while I readily concede that our society’s deification of athletes, particularly the professionals in one of the big three sports who win a lot, does represent a capital waste of time and resources, I think sports offers a lens into society that most other pastimes don’t, or can’t. Specifically, I think sports, in large part because of our national obsession with them, provide us to look at some thresholds between class and race that might otherwise be all but invisible.
Sports offers the chance for us to see the difference between what we say we believe and what we actually think. This includes the massive amount of time and money that we spend in watching them. For instance, a large part of the appeal is that professional athletics represents one of the core things that we as Americans purport to believe in, which is the idea of a meritocracy. No matter what political persuasion, people believe that the best athletes will inevitably rise to the top. In a lot of ways, that’s true. A lot of other, unwritten rules are evident in sports, too, like ‘you’re only in the wrong if you get caught.’ To me, that’s why the cheating controversy is so big. For the most part, we KNOW something’s going on, but we don’t really care all that much until somebody we don’t like is doing all the winning and ostensibly cheating. In its own way, that’s like the discrepancy between sentencing for crack and powder cocaine.
But that’s me, and I’ve been a sports fan my whole life. I would imagine that somebody who doesn’t do sports and has never done so wouldn’t feel the same way.
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