The usual little insults
Listening to this week’s On The Media podcast. Usual hosts are off, it is instead being hosted by NPR sports guy Mike Pesca. So of course he does a few stories on the sports media.
At one point, Pesca says that if a reported secret list of 100 steroid users becomes public in the future, and any of those users have been put into the hall of fame, how would the writers feel?
This was not said with the kind of seriousness used to discuss, say, the disputed FL results of 2000 elections.
But it was also not said with any kind of acknowledgement of the inherent frivolity of a) a hall of fame, b) a hall of fame for people who play a game for a living, c) a bunch of writers who write about a game selecting people for a hall of fame for people who play a game for a living, d) a bunch of writers who write about a game selecting people for a hall of fame for people who play a game for a living and who may or may not have injected themselves with drugs that make their penises smaller.
So here’s the thing: I don’t care about sports. It is the one topic in the universe that when I hear people talk about it, I feel no itchy need to go read some “Sports for Dummies.” Normally, any unfamiliar proper noun in an article or podcast sends me to an internet search, but I do not Wikipedia the names mentioned in sports-related human-interest stories. I have no idea who Poor Little Tink Tink is in real life and have, for me, a stunning complete lack of curiosity to find out.
That said, I hold no ill will or scorn towards people who DO care about sports. I think that’s totally cool.
I admire, in a dispassionate way, people who train their bodies and have that kind of discipline, and think being interested in it, like any hobby, is a nice way for people to focus on something besides themselves. Beyond that, I have no positive or negative moral judgment on either liking or being disinterested in sports.
These things are just things that exist that you like or don’t care about it and the world keeps on turning.
So as an outsider listening to this, it suddenly struck me that this would how comic it would inherently be to have anyone talking about FASHION with this level of seriousness on this kind of program. Not to say that there are not fashion awards and fashion shows, but the idea of a bunch of journalists wondering about the historic impact of some kind of “Best Of” list would have years down the road could only possibly play on a show like this as completely absurd.
Because in general, outside the fashion world, fashion people are made out to be totally ridiculous when being equally serious about what they care about. And why is that?
I mean, what are these two things but just some things human beings do? Sports is (are?) human beings disciplining their bodies and competing with and against each other in games of strength, agility and other physical attributes. Fashion is human beings meeting a basic need, expressing themselves through a particular form, working in creative collaboration with other human beings, and often personally developing a particular skill or craft.
And I realize this is not particularly deep or illuminating, but listening to this, this struck me - the disparity between how interest in sports is portrayed (reverence, noble, even obsessiveness is given a sort of chuckling pass) and interest in fashion is portrayed (height of meaningless frivolity, shallowness, uselessness, idiocy) - and I JUST GOT THE USUAL AMOUNT OF MAD.
