Dear Susan,
I know it’s not your favorite topic, but sports are so much more interesting than life that I have to lead off with it. I mentioned on our first day that soccer is all about misery, and if you scan today’s papers I hope you’ll see what I mean. First, you lose. Second, you lose to the nation that will derive the most pleasure from beating you. Third, you lose even though you deserve to win. The U.S. outplayed Iran for most of the game, but in soccer the goals are so infrequent that often the weaker team wins.
I’m not a big golf fan but I saw the last hole of the U.S. Open yesterday. Lee Janzen, who had finished his round, was leading by one stroke. Payne Stewart, trailing, was on the 18th hole. This set up a situation that illuminates the conflict between the good manners of the East Coast and the emotional exhibitionism of the West Coast. The TV people, who rule the world, as you know, put Janzen up on a stage in the locker room and focused a camera tight on his face while he watched Stewart play the final hole. It was a typically modern form of pornography, watching a guy’s tensest moment in close-up. When Stewart missed his final putt, Janzen knew he had won the championship, but he couldn’t be seen exulting over the other guy’s failure, so he shook his head politely. Then his wife, who looked embarrassed over the fact that she was happy over Stewart’s miss, embraced him. Janzen gave her the kind of self-conscious hug that reticent men give their wives when they know that 10 million people are watching. Then, realizing he’d been stingy with affection, he called her back and hugged her again. Then the camera cut to Janzen’s father, who was going into WASP ecstasy–he was standing outside smiling in front of a camera and trying to shake his fist in a manner that suggested pleasure. Then we cut back to Janzen, who is hiding his face in a towel because he has started crying. Then I read in Tom Boswell’s column in today’s Washington Post a series of quotes suggesting Janzen and Stewart are not exactly friendly rivals.
My colleague Fred Barnes has a theory that there are liberal sports and conservative sports. Golf is the ultimate conservative sport. Aside from the obvious–that it is played by rich white people at exclusive clubs–it is conservative because it is fiercely competitive but bounded by social conventions. Janzen couldn’t jump up and down and scream the way, say, football players do when an opponent misses a field goal. It’s not good form. Soccer, by the way, is the ultimate liberal sport. First, it often doesn’t reward merit. Second, when a soccer player gets nicked on the shins by an opponent, he goes into hysterics in hopes of drawing a foul, as if he’d just had an atom bomb blown up on his leg. Soccer players have mastered the politics of victimization.
I’ve poured through the rest of papers, but don’t find as much of interest. The IRS released a report on which federal employees are delinquent on their taxes. Workers at the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Labor are the most delinquent. Workers at Agriculture, Treasury and Justice are the least delinquent.
The Wall Street Journal has an A-head (which is the name for the funny column in the middle of the front page) on office refrigerators. It’s a classic Tragedy of the Commons situation; when everyone owns the property jointly nobody takes care of it. Office fridges are inevitably raunchy. One lady described in the Journal found a frozen lizard in hers. A co-worker’s pet had died and she wanted to preserve it so she could bring it in to the vet for an autopsy.
In the L.A. Times, David Savage has a pretty friendly profile of Clarence Thomas. As you know, the National Bar Association, the largest black lawyers and judges group, invited Thomas to speak at their conference, but then most of the organization’s leaders decided to disinvite him. Thomas insists their disinvitation is invalid and he’s coming.
On C-Span I saw a speech he gave to the Arkansas Bar Association. It was wonderful, a celebration of the Supreme Court and its collegiality. Audience members who had believed the press coverage about Thomas were clearly moved by it. In fact, I sense even the reporters are coming around; Savage’s up-beat profile is one of a few I’ve seen.
The only repulsive bits in it come from two law professors quoted, a Stanford prof named Pamela Karlen and a Southern University prof named Evelyn Wilson. Wilson, for example, said, “He has shown such a general insensitivity to people and their problems…. He still seems to distance himself from his roots and show the conservatives he deserves their support.” The premise of course, is that if a black person strays from the liberal orthodoxy he is betraying his group and is automatically morally inferior. It’s the sort of insufferable liberal righteousness I mentioned last week in regard to the tobacco bill.
I’m a conservative who lives in liberal neighborhoods, so I know that at most dinner parties somebody will give me a joking Nazi salute or make some crack about how I like to see starving children, and for Thomas it’s a million times worse. And for every strong person like Thomas who remains in the public eye, there are several black conservatives who flame out or retreat. Which is why my respect for Thomas is boundless. The Savage story emphasizes how much time he spends mentoring young people; which is true–if you read the Washington papers you will frequently come across mentions of some speech he gave to a local middle school.
all the best,
David
