The Days Of My Youth I Remember

Talk About The Flag Or Drugs Or Crime (never About Race Or Class Or Justice) And Follow The Yellow Brick Road To The Wonderful Land Of Consensus. In Place Of Honest Argument Among Consenting Adults The Politicians Substitute A Lullaby For Frightened Children: The Pretense That Conflict Doesn't Really Exist, That We Have Achieved The Blessed State In Which We No Longer Need Politics.

Except In A Few Well-publicized Instances (enough To Lend Credence To The Iconography Painted On The Walls Of The Media), The Rigorous Practice Of Rugged Individualism Usually Leads To Poverty, Ostracism And Disgrace. The Rugged Individualist Is Too Often Mistaken For The Misfit, The Maverick, The Spoilsport, The Sore Thumb.

But The Line Of Thought That I'd Been Chasing For Several Days Was Implicit In The Ruins Of The Old Roman Empire, Which Gradually Destroyed Itself By Substituting The Faith In A Legion Of Miraculous Words For The Strength Of Armies And The Weight Of Walls.

The Substitution Of Meaning Accounts For The Grasping Of Misers As Well As The Extravagance Of Spendthrifts. Karl Marx Well Understood This Peculiar Transformation Of Flesh Into Coin.

Unlike Any Other Business In The United States, Sports Must Preserve An Illusion Of Perfect Innocence. The Mounting Of This Illusion Defines The Purpose And Accounts For The Immense Wealth Of American Sports. It Is The Ceremony Of Innocence That The Fans Pay To See - Not The Game Or The Match Or The Bout, But The Ritual Portrayal Of A World In Which Time Stops And All Hope Remains Plausible, In Which Everybody Present Can Recover The Blameless Expectations Of A Child, Where The Forces Of Light Always Triumph Over The Powers Of Darkness.