CSotD: Boys of Summer, and a Good Old Boy: Summers
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Tulsa's Bruce Plante with a comment on the latest drug scandal in sports. A simple and well-executed play on Major League Baseball's logo, as well as (thankyouthankyouthankyou) one that doesn't feature a disillusioned child having the perfidy of heroes explained to him.
Mind you, those soppy cliches are not only expected and even, to some degree, appropriate, but there are more dimensions to it than that.
And, anyway, when the story of the little boy saying "Say it ain't so, Joe" first appeared nearly a century ago in coverage of the Black Sox scandal, sports had a much less critical level of coverage, which, if Jackson and others are to be believed, included making up stories like that one.
Sportswriters helped create legends, and it's a commonplace these days to note that Babe Ruth used to get drunk without it making the papers and that Ty Cobb was pretty much a lousy person on every level, while writers happily went along with the media-manipulation of Bill Veeck because it made good copy, even when it went historically, monumentally wrong.
About the time that last glorious debacle was unfolding, a new brand of take-no-prisoners sportswriter was beginning to emerge in the form of wise-guy columnists who greeted sports management with a cynicism that, IMHO, over-corrected to the other extreme but appears to have captured the zeitgeist, with the result that we now have a substantial amount of "So what?" response to athletes who take performance-enhancing drugs, as well as some "Why take it out on A-Rod?" coverage in which suspicion of baseball management blends with an approach to great athletes that would have pleased Ruth and Cobb.
I like Plante's simple statement, declaring that it's a major, pervasive problem, but not weeping crocodile tears nor dismissing it as inevitable.
And if MLB is willing to call a few star athletes to account, maybe they can provide a few tips to the SEC.
(Though the cynical take is that the Yankees would be thrilled to have A-Rod's ban upheld because, juiced or not, he's never really been worth the price of his contract, as Tank McNamara noted a dozen years ago.)
Meanwhile, and speaking of money:
Jen Sorensen is not the only one asking why on earth dusty old Larry Summers is being brought out of storage as a prospective Fed Chair, but she's done the best job of laying out her argument.
Which, I would note, ties in to a distressing level with yesterday's (no link needed, just scroll down) discussion of the chummy, insider cabal Washington DC has become, a factor that, as she notes, the whole "Hope and Change" thing was supposed to cure.
Jen gets bonus points for not dwelling on Summers' 2005 sexist blunder in which he wondered, aloud and in public, why women were under-represented in the science field. As head of Harvard, he might have asked around, because there are reportedly some pretty bright people there, which I guess she does address in the "famously arrogant and tone-deaf" area above.
I swiped that last link from Liza Donnelly, who not only remembers the remark but pokes a little fun at the reflexive and not-so-analytical "ick factor" it continues to carry.
The two cartoons make for much more interesting comparison than the tired old "One For It; One Against It" pairings that show up on some sites, which are, really, just a graphic form of the gutless "on the one hand, but then again on the other" thumbsucker editorials that often appear in the same places.
And let me add here that, if "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation" would put Sorensen and Donnelly on a panel to discuss the importance of the next Fed Chairman being someone other than a Good Old Boy, I might start watching again.
However, the idea of either show discussing the need for fresh faces is too meta for me to ponder.
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