barry bonds
Ran across this highly sensible take on Barry Bonds and steroids today.
I honestly find it amazingly pathetic that people get all bent out of shape because they suspect that Bonds used steroids, and that somehow mars his upcoming breaking of the homerun record. I mean in light of various facts, such as:
- 30,000 children will die today from lack of clean water and enough calories.
- Major League baseball is a US$5 Billion industry
- 300,000 forcibly drafted child soldiers are currently fighting for the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda.
- 800,000 people will be trafficked across international borders this year
- There are Twenty Million refugees in the world (this does not include internally displaced persons).
- Bonds is getting paid US$15.8 million to play baseball this year.
- 2 Billion people in the world are living in poverty on US$2/day or less
... who gives a shit? Or to quote my dear departed grandfather, Benjamin Wheeler Ady Jr., who gives a flying rat's ass? Does it matter if Bonds used steroids, oxycodone, marijuana, or any other legal or illegal substance? What difference does in make in the world? How important could it possibly be?
3 comments:
You said "I honestly find it amazingly pathetic that people get all bent out of shape about..."
Oh, the irony!
Stephanie,
You're half right. (that whole dividing by zero thing, you know?)
or this, from Wikipedia's article: While many reputable critics limit irony to something resembling Aristotle's definition, an influential set of texts insists that it be understood, not as a limited tool, but as a disruptive force with the power to undo texts and readers alike. This tradition includes Søren Kierkegaard, 19th-century German critic and novelist Friedrich Schlegel ("On Incomprehensibility"), Charles Baudelaire, Stendhal, and the 20th-century deconstructionist Paul de Man ("The Concept of Irony"). Briefly, it insists that irony is, in Kierkegaard's words, "infinite, absolute negativity". Where much of philosophy attempts to reconcile opposites into a larger positive project, Kierkegaard and others insist that irony — whether expressed in complex games of authorship or simple litotes — must, in Kierkegaard's words, "swallow its own stomach". Irony entails endless reflection and violent reversals, and ensures incomprehensibility at the moment it compels speech. Not surprisingly, irony is the favorite textual property of deconstructionists.
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