truth cannot be imparted, it must be inflicted
Rick Reilly, a columnist for Sports Illustrated and overall famous sportswriter guy, published a fairly straightforward compare/contrast essay on two fourth-grade basketball teams that exist at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. He begins by describing the Texas team whose travels and expenditures are lavish and underwritten by some guy who has a net worth of $1.1 billion. The team has a chartered plane, lives large, etc. Then (in italics) he writes about a team from DC with a social worker for a coach and a 2000 Suburban for transportation purposes. This team sometimes stays in motels that are quite dirty and some of the parents can’t afford the tournament fees, which means the social worker/coach steps in and does it himself. The article ends by schmaltzily reporting that the poor DC team has beaten the rich Texas team all four times they have faced each other this year.
A couple of preliminary questions: are you the type of person who roots for the underdog? Do you generally cast the underdog as a poor, urban, underprivileged youth who faces surmountable but soulforce-draining obstacles? Conversely, do you sometimes think that being the son of an ultrarich, ultrasuccessful individual who pays for you and your teammates and your teammates’ parents might also be difficult, though in a different way than being the son of someone poor? Do you hold something against the very rich and also have a set of static classificatory traits you tend to assign to them, some of which are positive but perhaps not all? Is thinking about class a bit like doing a math problem the likes of which you’ve never seen, in that you don’t really know how to begin and the attempt to just like manipulate symbols or whatever feels like it has no basis in what should actually be going on?
I think the notion that life with money isn’t easier than life without money is strange, though I buy into the assumption that people with means can live lives that are just as miserable, helpless, and stultified as the rest of us. I’ve lived on $14,000 a year and $28,000 a year, and the latter is easier in the sense that it shuttles a certain set of worries off to the side but (the catch) other, more virulently autonomous worries may then go on to colonize that space. I guess the move to generalize about this (for me) mucks it all up.
Point being, something about this Reilly article bothered me, and it’s not just the lame tone and the unspoken treacle that ends up speaking louder than anything else. There is the aggravating assumption that the reader would finish the article, sit back and sigh, and reflect on the unique way in which sport transcends the gritty reality of economic disparity. This is going to end without resolution or even much rational analysis. I’m done. Ends now.
A couple of preliminary questions: are you the type of person who roots for the underdog? Do you generally cast the underdog as a poor, urban, underprivileged youth who faces surmountable but soulforce-draining obstacles? Conversely, do you sometimes think that being the son of an ultrarich, ultrasuccessful individual who pays for you and your teammates and your teammates’ parents might also be difficult, though in a different way than being the son of someone poor? Do you hold something against the very rich and also have a set of static classificatory traits you tend to assign to them, some of which are positive but perhaps not all? Is thinking about class a bit like doing a math problem the likes of which you’ve never seen, in that you don’t really know how to begin and the attempt to just like manipulate symbols or whatever feels like it has no basis in what should actually be going on?
I think the notion that life with money isn’t easier than life without money is strange, though I buy into the assumption that people with means can live lives that are just as miserable, helpless, and stultified as the rest of us. I’ve lived on $14,000 a year and $28,000 a year, and the latter is easier in the sense that it shuttles a certain set of worries off to the side but (the catch) other, more virulently autonomous worries may then go on to colonize that space. I guess the move to generalize about this (for me) mucks it all up.
Point being, something about this Reilly article bothered me, and it’s not just the lame tone and the unspoken treacle that ends up speaking louder than anything else. There is the aggravating assumption that the reader would finish the article, sit back and sigh, and reflect on the unique way in which sport transcends the gritty reality of economic disparity. This is going to end without resolution or even much rational analysis. I’m done. Ends now.
posted by am at
2:14 PM
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