The Substitution Of Meaning Accounts For The

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.

Usually When I Drank Too Much, I Could Guess Why I Did So, The Objective Being To Murder A State Of Consciousness That I Didn't Have The Courage To Sustain--a Fear Of Heights, Which Sometimes During The Carnival Of The 1960s Accompanied My Attempts To Transform The Bourgeois Journalist Into An Avant-garde Novelist. The Stepped-up Ambition Was A Commonplace Among The Would-be William Faulkners Of My Generation; Nearly Always It Resulted In Commercial Failure And Literary Embarrassment.

[for American Consumer Society], The Country's Reserves Of Ignorance Constitute A Natural Resource As Precious As The Mississippi River Or The Long-lost Herds Of Buffalo.

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.

Most Of The Ladies And Gentlemen Who Mourn The Passing Of The Nation's Leaders Wouldn't Know A Leader If They Saw One. If They Had The Bad Luck To Come Across A Leader, They Would Find Out That He Might Demand Something From Them, And This Impertinence Would Put An Abrupt And Indignant End To Their Wish For His Return.