This is great news:
Rep. Darrell Issa, the incoming chairman of the House subcommittee that called the iconic hearings into steroid use in baseball, has no interest in exploring performance-enhancing drugs in sports, his spokesman told FanHouse.
The smartly bespectacled Matt Welch hits a homer with the following observation about weaselly stadium-welfare types:
[M]ore often than not they take us to a place where there is little in the way of economic interest in speaking up for truth, justice, and the American way of not having to give two shits about sports as opposed to having your money stolen and life uprooted just because rich a-hole wants to shake down the idiot money tree at City Hall. It is a shameful, shameful racket, every last bit of it...
Amen, brother.
As someone who has upgraded in recent years from not giving a shit about sports to not giving two shits, I am more appalled than ever when I hear about the racket that is cities kowtowing to sports team owners and ponying up millions in tax-payer dollars to help finance stadiums or to bring teams to the area. The mass deceit that it will bring "economic growth" is rarely even close to the truth.
While I don't follow them, I don't have anything against sports. In fact, I used to play a lot of them when I was a kid. But I don't care now. I'm okay with you all who do like and follow them to want to keep “the tradition” alive and strong, but please: not on my dime. Don't force me to support your hobby/interest.
If sports really are such a Mom-and-Apple-Pie American thing, if they really are great community-driven events and activities, if they really are so worthwhile, surely it will be able to find ways to support itself without my help. Surely those who think it is so great would be willing to help pay for it themselves.
But as is usually the case, everyone is quick to sing the virtues of something ("Baseball is the pinnacle of American sports!!") but equally quick to duck responsibility for keeping it financially afloat. Ask them to pony up for donations or yearly subscriptions, tickets, you name it, and they squirm and try to get out of as much of it as possible (hey, who can blame people for being frugal in these Uncertain Economic Times™?), but they'll jump at the opportunity to push local governments to send scrilla their way.
It is the quintessential "cake and eat it too" kind of thinking. We want all these wonderful things but we don't want to have to actually pay for it ourselves. Well, I'm sorry, but that isn't how the world works. As a friend of mine's dad once said that has stuck with me for quite some time, "It costs money to live." TANSTAAFL and all that.
No comments:
Post a Comment