The Sports World is No Model for Washington
(Flickr/Chris Denbow)
Former Republican Senator George Allen has a penchant for the occasional sports analogy. Now he has written a new book, What Washington Can Learn From the World of Sports, a 174 page pastoral on the merits of sporting mentality in politics. Never too timid to leave a cliché unturned, Allen peppered his stump speeches with sporting rhetoric gingerly, privileged with on-the-field insights as the son of a Hall of Fame football coach. The book is not interesting for its political observations or policy recommendations—it has precious few and rarely strays beyond reliable talking points that are as staid as Bear Bryant’s trademark houndstooth hat. Instead, Allen’s work is a compelling read because it reveals how out of touch is a conservative’s worldview. In trying to impress upon the political elite the efficiency and alleged “meritocracy” of sports, Allen demonstrates a stoicism that is dangerous and unnerving.
The reader knows something is amiss quite early in the read. Chapter one is titled, “Armchair Quarterbacks Never Score Touchdowns,” Cartesian orthodoxy be damned. I suppose they cannot. Once I saw footage of a pre-convicted Michael Vick throw a 45-yard touchdown pass in a scrimmage while sitting near midfield. But that wasn’t a real game, and a snarling defensive back wasn’t torpedoing into his side. But an armchair is good for cogitation. You sit, perhaps by an Amish-build transportable fireplace, and read. You learn that, maybe, the armchair musings of Adam Smith have been upended by decades of Keynesian thought, and sentences like, “you don’t create real private sector jobs by coming up with more costly, massive government programs,” are more deserving of parody than exposition.
But the troubles begin when Allen asserts the dynamics of sports can manifest the perfect society all political ideologues aspire to create. At a blogger’s briefing at the Heritage Foundation promoting the marriage of sports and politics, Politco reports he said:
In sports, “you don’t care about their religion, their race, their ethnicity, where they’re from. … It’s a meritocracy. It’s a level playing field where everybody has that equal opportunity to succeed.” But Washington “wants equal results regardless of how much effort was put into it.”
I read this instantly thinking of the Southeastern Conference maintaining a policy of athletic non-integration until 1966. I read this recalling with discomfort five-time NBA All-Star Tim Hardaway saying coolly he hates gay people and that “it shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States,” in an interview in 2007. I consider how quickly a friendship erodes by the currents of nationalism. Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, heroes of Team Yugoslavia winning basketball silver in the 1988 Seoul games, promptly ended all contact when Serbia and Croatia went to war and ignited a conflagration in the Balkans. The latter, and Croat, would die in 1993 in an auto accident, never repairing his friendship with the Serbian Divac.
Nestled in Allen’s swipe at Washington is the view affirmative action and welfare saddle the efforts of the hard working for the benefit of the indolent and uninspired. Never mind that wages have remained stagnant for decades. That while productivity in the 2000s rose by 20 percent, wages only rose by three percent. That the median household income in 1973, adjusted for inflation, would be only seven thousand dollars less than the median household income today, even though more mothers work today than 37 years ago. And no, the median income for women today is not seven thousand dollars. Wages have remained constant or have collapsed for most of society’s rungs, even while productivity increased. The market, like the sporting world, is not a just place.
This double-take effect Allen has over his viewers and readers is persistent. He quotes a friend saying the “sports section is the only part of the newspaper where you get the truth”, admiring that quip “because it’s hard to distort or manipulate the scores and the statistics.” Sports fans are notoriously fickle and averse to qualitative evidence—not unlike many supply-side advocates. But numbers never tell the whole story. It’s why policy is viewed qualitatively and quantitatively, with concern for human and labor rights that outweigh concerns over the bottom-line.
He opines that athletes don’t like umpires because they get in the way of the game as it should be played, something analogous to the “folks in Washington who are determining who wins or loses. … In a free-enterprise system, it’s the consumers who decide who has the best product, the best service.” The last three years can be best described as the failure of deregulation, so one has to wonder, in vein, the prudence of that remark. In sports too, league intervention has been good for the game. New doping measures in baseball, the reform of the blue line in hockey, instant replay in tennis—all regulatory enforcements that make the game fairer.
The sports world Allen imagines is just that—imaginary. Sports and politics have both a conciliatory and adversarial relationship with society’s confused pace toward progress. Yet for Allen, there is only the ideal, the unyielding belief in what should be rather than what is on the ground. His utopianism, in striving for something effortless, becomes destructive.
re-posted from http://tinyurl.com/25jxtej 3 June 2010
