It was by happenstance that I read a story by Nathaniel Frum—32-year-old-son of David Frum, the creep who’s parlayed his NeverTrump purple prose into a small fortune—in The Atlantic, a not altogether loony-bin opinion that Democrats ought to speak out about sports more often, like Trump does. In April, I wrote a story, in part, about the importance of men (and often women) demonstrating at least a passing knowledge of MLB, NFL, NBA, etc. as a way to break the ice in a business conversation.
Frum writes: “If Democrats want to defeat authoritarianism, they need to win the trust of people who are not necessarily politically engaged. To do that, they could do worse than to start expressing their own hot takes on sports. These shouldn’t repeat already-popular opinions as a way to seem relatable. The perfect take should actually be unpopular, counter to the consensus, and specific.”
The younger Frum doesn’t demonstrate much aptitude for writing, as his use of internet clichés (some like drawers that haven’t been washed in a fortnight) like “hot takes” and the word “actually,” which ought to be temporarily benched because of its gratuitous use, the same as “literally” and the passive sentence, “Yes, Full Disclosure is engaging, but…” One more: “I’m sorry, but J.D. Vance gives the word ‘hillbilly” a bad name.” Why do people have to qualify their opinions rather than having the balls to just state them? Drives me nuts.
The larger problem is Frum advocating sports talk “to defeat authoritarianism,” as if Republicans have a monopoly on that.
Right now, I don’t want to talk sports (except with my son Booker) because my baseball team since the early-1960s, the Boston Red Sox, are sleep-walking through the franchise’s worst season in memory. Even when the Sox finished last in the A.L. East in recent years, they weren’t listen-to-Led-Zeppelin-all-day boring. The team’s saddled with an incompetent Chief Baseball Officer, Craig Breslow, who demonstrated his robotic decision-making a year ago by trading (for nothing) the Sox’s slugger Rafael Devers (that Devers has underperformed with the Giants has no bearing on what he could’ve continued at Fenway). What separates this year’s Sox with past losers is that they’re going for a 1962-Mets level, mostly because their offense is dormant. Trade Aroldis Chapman, Santino Gray and Jarren Duran. Now (although Chapman and Duran’s value has taken a hit).
I hate that it’s just late-June and my main interest is rooting against the Yankees and trying to figure out what team can deny them a World Series win. Maybe the Brewers, Braves or the Dodgers, but definitely no American League team. Anyway, that’s my “hot take” of the week and, as my predictions mean nothing—just like the next guy—hope I’m wrong.
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I see that The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Continetti is at it again. I’m hard on the middle-aged son-in-law of Bill Kristol, because, unlike Father-And-Son Frum, he knows how to write. Just not lately, as he ostentatiously waves the American flag into a void.
He writes: “If the rising generation—known as Gen Z—embraces a culture of ingratitude and rejection, American exceptionalism will fade into history. Socialism and anti-Semitism will march to the fore. Political violence will be normalized. The national motto will change from ‘E Pluribus Unum’ to ‘LOL Nothing Matters. No one should want to inhabit such a future.”
What’s the alternative? Doing a suicide-bomber number at the corporate offices of The New York Times? I’ll pass. But give credit to Mr. American Exceptionalism for schooling readers that “the rising generation” is known as “Gen Z.” You learn something new every two months.
I’ll be generous and assume that Continetti has forgotten all the history he’s read. Was “American exceptionalism” on display in the 1960s and 70s, when JFK, LBJ and Nixon waged a Redcoats-war in Vietnam? Wasn’t political violence “normalized” with the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Bobby Kennedy, and the attempts on the lives of George Wallace, Jerry Ford and Ronald Reagan? The American-led coups in Iran (1953) and Chile (1973)? FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII? Anita Bryant’s sick anti-gay rights rhetoric in the late-1970s?
I thought the 1980s was a great decade, but many disagreed, including Hollywood, which brought Wall Street (“greed is good”) to theaters in ’87 and six years later, Michael Douglas’ best film performance in Falling Down. Was Bill Clinton’s behavior in the White House (sex, selling the Lincoln Bedroom) and previous dirty dealings in Arkansas “exceptional”? What about Al Gore’s hocus-pocus on global warming/climate change?
I’m the grandson of Irish immigrants, and glad I was born in the United States. By a long shot. But this constant harangue about “American exceptionalism” (taught by rote in the public schools I attended) is, in large part, a fiction. Like many countries, the U.S. has had millions of “exceptional” citizens through the years, but the propaganda is unnecessary.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023
