Congratulations to Barry Bonds on attaining the most hallowed record in American sports (though on a personal note, I am still more amazed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's 38,000+ career points and Cy Young's 511 career wins...and there is still the legend that Josh Gibson hit up to 920 HR in the Negro League).
And with that, I have fulfilled my baseball-related posting quota of 1 for the season. Let's move on, shall we?
Or so it seems to go in the sports media. I can understand the news media's quick shuffling off of this story, it's just sports and it's not like baseball means to the country today what it meant in say 1961 when Maris broke Babe Ruth's single-season HR record, heck it's even less relevant today than it was 5 years ago when Bonds broke McGwire's single-season HR record. The fact is, we live in a cynical culture in which we, as the axiom goes, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Why else would we go straight away to the possible financial value of the Bonds ball? I understand the desire to become an instant millionaire (by the by, to whom is this ball worth $5,000,000 exactly, if everyone is interested in it only to sell it off for large sums?) Gone are the days when kids would hit the ballpark and try to get autographs and collect baseball cards and know the stats for all the players. It's much easier in a SportsCenter culture to catch the home runs, strikeouts and diving catches once a day on ESPN than to watch the games at all. The only people who do know the stats are the fantasy geeks and they have no allegiances to teams, only the individual players; they don't even care about the outcome of the games their various players are in (unless they have a pitcher in the mix and need him to get a win with at least 6 IP, 4 strikeouts and no more than 2 walks and 3 runs given up to lock up the top seed in his/her league playoffs).
This reminds me of the way the passing of two master of the cinema, Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, last week, passed without much of a blip. People don't know who they are, nor do they care. The films remain, but folks today don't seem particularly interested in seeking them (or much of anything else) out. If it's not readily available, it's not worth my time to seek out seems to be the mantra of today. Youtube has become the preferred source of entertainment for a generation. How much longer can we see pet tricks and people running into poles or falling down in painful ways, 1:06 at a time, before we realize how low our standards have gone? Is this really the future of entertainment? And don't even get me started on what passes for entertainment on TV these days.
There's been an interesting running discussion across the web about who/what in our entertainment will stand the test of time the way The Beatles, Babe Ruth, Alfred Hitchcock (at least in name), or Shakespeare (to go a little further back) and the like have. I saw a great argument that we no longer live in a "must-see" world. The ability for any event/song/movie/show/speech to affect the culture widely and immediately no longer exists here. There is no longer the shared experience that creates a cohesive culture. What it means to be an American, culturally, is constantly expanding (or eroding, depending how you look at it). Whether this is a good thing remains to be seen, but it certainly represents a shift that I think is worth taking note of, no?
1 comment:
The question of longevity is an interesting one indeed. I was looking through music released this year and wondering which, if any, would stand the so-called test of time. I'm not sure any will.
And film isn't different. Am to seriously expect The Departed to be glorified for decades to come? Perhaps it's all really to do with the vastness of our media machine. Maybe there is simply too much out there for any of to really matter in the long run: for to matter in the long run, something must dominate the collective conscious in the present. Rarely, it ever, does that mainline dominance happen.
Except, of course, the dominance of The Titantic.
Post a Comment