SI

In the latest Sports Illustrated, there's an article by a guy who writes in the typical SI omnipotent quasi-1st person view, only this one has the additional good sense to scold everyone else while implicitly patting himself on the back for his moral outrage. Over baseball. The sport that gave us death threats to Jackie Robinson, the life of Ty Cobb, Pete Rose, the Black Sox, and Little Big League. Please. Let's all shed tears over our loss of innocence as a nation. It's not over the mass slaughter of Indians, or slavery, or the Civil War. It's not over Japanese internment camps or the presidency of Richard Nixon. It's over baseball. An English sport, to be sure. The thrust of the article is essentially this guy calling people and gauging their outrage. His tone is unmitigated self-righteousness, stemming, no doubt, from the editors wanting to see this issue from the perspective of the fan. Unfortunately, our nation of baseball fans is as full of bloviating panty-waists as it is political "personalities," the latter of which, of course have gauged the outrage typified by our not-as-smart-as-their-chaucer-reading-liteary-colleagues-but-god-bless-'em-they-try newspaper columnists and have decided (the political folks) to take action in the form of.... talking about it. For eleven hours. And then they go back to harboring fantasies of sending Navy SEALS to Florida to plunge a feeding tube back into a vegetable.
To me, this is an indication of just how dumb, self-interested, and opportunistic the American public is.... just like the media, eh?

This is not to say that Americans are intrinsically dumb - look at the hooliganism in Europe and these assholes issuing fatwahs in the Middle East. This world, to quote Mozzer, is full of crashing bores. To get most individuals by themselves, they'll turn out to be quite insightful and reasonable. It's just when people get their baser self-righteous tendencies validated by others with a blog (such as this) or some other mode (such as a radio show), they froth at the mouth and demand recourse for whatever perceived slight that has been visited upon them. So, to close, I have a rhetorical question - what came first - Mitch Albom, or the moral outrage?