With the money I'm making, I should be playing two positions. ~Pete Rose, 1977
News hounding has taken on a surreal quality the past few months. As the world economies convulse and reel like a flock of headless chickens, watching the news has become more akin to watching pregnant bubbles drift and swell to their bursting point, than scanning standard fare news fish wrap.
One by one, the bubbles went up, floating free and easy, inflated by the hot gasses of greed and over speculation, until the harsh reality of living in air too pressurized for their thin shells to withstand forced them down into the sunlight, where the super agitated bubbles collide and stick to one another, the unwieldy weight of each pulling the other closer toward an explosive end.
And then, in the light of day, they all popped at once. First went the real estate bubble, which wrecked headlong into the stock market bubble, which took down the credit bubble, and so on.
Every day, vital industries come screaming down out of the sky, wings on fire, engines shot through, their pilots searching desperately in their shattered cockpits for a bailout handle to pull, crashing back down to earth, where reason dictates that to rise again, the captains of industry will have to launch their jets with new energy, or stay stagnant and flaccidly mothballed.
But there in the dawn of a new era of fiscal reorganization and responsibility, a single bubble wobbles upward into the stratosphere. The sports bubble holds the news hound's attention raptly. He watches it nervously, knowing the inevitable decline is near.
What keeps it aloft even now in these turbulent winds? The modern American sports industry is built on corporate sponsorships, bloated television contracts supported by outrageously expensive advertising rates, and large doses of discretionary income from diehard sports junkies.
Owners rake in exorbitant profits by casting wide nets into these revenue streams, extracting billions of dollars like fat, mindless trout. In turn, and perhaps, rightfully so, the players and athletes, the men and women who at times risk life and limb to entertain the beleaguered masses fleece the owners for their own, considerable take.
For example, on some cold night during this not-so great, depressed winter, some "lucky" baseball team will win the services of one Manny Ramirez, a 37-year-old professional hitter with the hand-eye coordination of a savant quilter.
Widely sought after for his preternatural ability to weave his silver bat expertly through the filthiest of darting laces, Ramirez is expected to sign with his next squad for upwards of $25 million a year, for perhaps the amount of years that a sloth has toes.
1 Comments
Loading more comments...
This comment and all replies have been deleted This comment has been deleted Undo delete