Hell in a Handbasket

That's where the country's headed, folks, and I'm not afraid to say it. Things are worse now than they have ever been before. I could hardly bear to watch the whole sorry mess unfold today, but there it is...as a country, can't we allow a sick human being fade away in peace? Is it really worthwhile for a life so useless, so tortured, so (dare I say it?) meaningless to continue? Can we not, as human beings, acknowledge that the time has come to put an end to unnecessary suffering?

I'm talking, of course, about Bobby Knight going back to the Sweet Sixteen.

Not everyone knows about Bobby Knight, even though he is on TV a lot. Well, he's a basketball coach...and, if there is a Hell for people who take sports too seriously, Bobby Knight lost his soul to it long ago.

Some people think that he has mellowed in recent years, because he used to throw chairs and kick people when he got angry about the way a basketball game was going, but he no longer does this. I suppose you could make an argument that a man who once threw a metal folding chair because he disliked the way a game was going, but who has not done something similar in a long time, deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to deciding if he still takes sports too seriously. But my feeling is, he was already a grownup when he did that, so, if I ever see Bobby Knight with a chair, I'm speaking to him calmly, and I'm standing at a safe distance.

The point, though, is not that Bobby Knight is a bad person, because he's not. He has what many of us Y-chromosome afflicted people have, but he has it worse than most of us. When it comes to sports, you see, we are much more emotionally invested than we ought to be.

The other example of this is Congress, and their recent nationally-televised hearings on the ultra-important national security issue of whether baseball players take drugs to help them hit home runs. You might think that Congress, what with the continuing danger that the next World Series will be canceled on account of the Bronx being reduced to ash by a nuclear explosion, would have more pressing concerns.

But Congress, like Bobby Knight, just couldn't help itself. Jim Bunning, a Senator from Kentucky who could not find the time to travel to that state and debate his opponent during his recent reelection bid, found time to testify about his major league baseball career before these hearings. (It turns out that he's against steroids, too. Thanks for the info, man.)

The Congressmen, most of whom spent a lot of time talking at the hearing about how much they loved baseball as kids and how they want to preserve this beautiful sport for generations to come, had to do it. They were compelled. This is just what men do...we care about sports more than we should. Can't help it. Could it be that we're afraid to deal with important things, so we waste our lives drowning in unimportant things? Could be...

After all, the steroid hearings were not all that Congress did this weekend. They also got heavily involved in this one instance in Florida where a woman has been really sick for a long time and can't live without a feeding tube or talk, so her husband wanted to take out the tube so she could die with dignity, because he thought that's what she wanted. But here parents said, No, that's our daughter, and we think she would want to stay alive and besides, that's what we want, too. So they couldn't agree and it ended up in court. Congress is very worried about this. Not euthanasia as a wider issue, just this one case. They say they don't want to set a "wider precedent." Hey, it's all right, you're just Congress. Leave the big issues to somebody else, right? Precedents are for the Supreme Court, I guess.

Life and death, the mysteries of human existence, the infinite possibilities of human thought...I know we can't be working on these things all the time. But come on, guys. Let's show a little effort and do, like 50/50. You know, spend half the weekend going on TV about steroids, okay, but then spend the rest talking about the deficit. Boring, but important. Sort of like most of our lives.