You all remember the pre-Olympic social responsibility hype, don't you? All the kvetching and grousing and whining and grinding about how athletes have a duty to speak out on social issues, and where were the NBA players on Darfur and Chinese human rights violations and Nike business interest conflicts ... all very inspiring, all very gasbag-ish.
The reason we say "gasbag-ish," though, isn't because folks were wrong to ask the athletes to make a stand on something more important than beating Angola, but because when confronted with actual socially involved athletes, they scratch their heads and say, "Five more days to Brett Favre."
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| Point guards Gilbert Arenas and Baron Davis have spoken. Who will follow? (Getty Images) |
The silly/degrading season has already been in full swing awhile now, in which we show the world that we not only don't have the best political system in the world, but that we are hard at work every day making it worse. But then along come Gilbert Arenas, aka Agent Zero, and Baron Davis, aka Boom Dizzle and "The Clippers?" to bring us back to the true issues of the day.
First, via Arenas' own blog, at the end of the Aug. 4 entry:
"If you have any type of money, you're a Republican, period," Arenas wrote, "so, it's hard because you see a better-looking president in Obama -- I don't even want to say because he's black, but he just looks the part -- and then you have McCain who is Republican and I'm like, man. I know Obama is going to raise taxes on the upper class from 20-60 percent, that's what I'm looking at."
OK, a little provincial, but self-interest counts too.
Only Davis rose from his own blog in rebuttal.
"Hope ya'll watched Barack Obama's acceptance speech Thursday night. If he didn't move you maybe the sound was turned down. When it was over I felt like I was ready to go out to Venice Beach and start registering people to vote right then at 9 p.m. We've got to show up on Nov. 4th to vote this man into the White House!!! FOR REAL!
"His ideas about recharging our education system by investing in early education and raising teacher's salaries were seriously inspiring ... And Barack is planning to do it across the whole country. Incredible."
And then to show that he was reading Arenas, he added this special personal note:
"I know he said he's gonna raise the taxes on the top income bracket, Gil, but if he uses that money to improve our schools then you won't have to worry about some kids trying to sell pictures of your pool online cause they couldn't get a better job."
And then the authenticating coup de grace:
"LOL."
Now match that up against anything, and we mean anything, you'd see on any of the achingly stupid, overtly dishonest and soul-crushing political shows and tell us this isn't better, more easily understood, less spun and more genuine. Tell us you wouldn't watch an hour of that before you'd watch five minutes of Chris Matthews or Charles Krauthammer or Howard Fineman or Bill Maher or your Fox hand puppet of choice. And if you can't, go sit at the other end of the bar.
Not only that, a series of Zero-Dizzle debates would break the Barkley Glass Ceiling, in which Charles Barkley is apparently the only one who speaks on matter more encompassing than the view in the bathroom mirror.
This is what we're asking for -- political awareness on some visible level. This is what we were slaughtering Kobe Bryant and LeBron James and the rest of the U.S. Olympians for not doing. This would be civics for the kids, something to engage our disaffected youth/slack-jawed progenitors in something other than which character on MTV's I'm Snottier Than You series brings them closest to hurling.
Well, we have it now. What NBATV is waiting for, we have no earthly idea, but it would surely break up its daily programming of NBA Classics from last February, WNBA Game Of The Night or whatever the hell else it shows during the offseason.
And it isn't like the fellows would even have to break their training schedules to fit it in. Arenas and Davis both talk the way most other creatures breathe, and they both like the sound of your voice admiring the sound of theirs. They are naturals, I tell you, and they will advance the cause of national political discourse beyond the "Obama's too thin and Palin's daughter is too not" level of idiocy we have before us now.
In other words, it's time for this, and for more reasons than we've covered now. A historic moment in history requires a historic moment in forensics (and no, not the blood-spatter-pattern-around-the-corpse forensics -- the public-speaking forensics), and we have it before us now. All we have to do is find enough lawyers and producers to make it happen, and if we know anything about America in the new millennium, it is that we are up to our eyelids with lawyers and producers.
And while we're at it, let's see what the fellows have to say about that subject too. Minds like these should not be confined to politics. They should be allowed to drown out as much of regular TV as possible -- for the good of the country, you'll all agree.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
