Suburban Delusions: Prager on Feelgood "Sports"

This past weekend, a friend of mine attended his 13-year-old son's baseball game. What he saw encapsulates a major reason many of us fear for the future of America and the West...His son's team was winning 24-7 as the game entered the last inning. When he looked up at the scoreboard, he noticed that the score read 0-0. Naturally, he inquired as to what happened -- was the scoreboard perhaps broken? -- and was told that the winning team's coach asked the scoreboard keeper to change the score. He and some of the parents were concerned that the boys on the losing team felt humiliated....Compassion and the Decline of America, Dennis Prager, Townhall, 3/20/2007

Prager goes on and correctly identifies the way this kind of thinking leads to mushy-headed adults who don't believe in anything and who don't fight or work for anything. Trouble is that Prager is looking at only one part of America, that font of idyllic dreams, the liberal suburban community. He is right insofar as that part of America is the predominant one in our political system. But has Prager ever attended an urban playground basketball game? Or an urban Dominican league baseball game?

If you thought the NBA was competitive, watch the lengths that teenagers and young adults will go to beat one another on a playground basketball court. If you're tired of the posturing of steroid-drenched major leaguers, you should see the talent, work ethic, and devotion to winning by unpaid baseball players in the Dominican league. Prager's suburb is not universal, but a sad artifact of the good little liberal's delusions. For some of them, it's the sweet little animals of a cartoon, the talking lions who don't rip the abdomen out of a passing human being, the snake that won't sink venomous fangs in the thigh of anyone who disturbs it. For others, frighteningly depicted by Spielberg, of all people, in depicting parents lusting for a perfectly loving child in A.I., it's a child untroubled by conflict, fear, or loss. Oh, don't we all wish for such things?

But looking at even as benign a setting as a corporate office, does anyone believe such a vision has the remotest possibility? It's not just the men who slash at each other's throats, however metaphornically. The good liberal suburbs depicted by Prager, in their gushing worry about their precious children having to experience loss in a sport, for God's sakes, represents a future once imagined by H.G. Welles in The Time Machine. In that future, the world would apparently be dominated by passive little non-aggressors, all lovey-dovey, Haight-Ashbury without the drugs. The rest of Welles's story, though, was of course the story. Passive little non-aggressors can only exist if someone else does the work, including the competition. In Welles's story, the price for this exacted from the infantilized "human" adults was to subject them to periodic cannibalism. The competitive types in urban areas will exact a different price, not so bloody perhaps, but far more decisive: domination of the future.

This I am sure Prager would agree with, smart fellow that he is. The future belongs to those willing to compete for it, not to those who feel good about the present moment. And it's no news to note that feel good present moments, like the high from crack cocaine, quickly fade.

Luther