JG etc.

You can feel it in the air, read it on the major portal sites, and see it on TV news stations. People are not happy with the direction of America. Whether it is the President’s approval rating or the new $1 trillion budget for the war this year, while still cutting out important equipment for our soldiers. This is not Republican or Democrat, this is a country in a deep state of depression.

I didnt forsee the day that ESPN the Magazine would bring me closer to enlightenment on the issues of our nation, surely that was left for Time or The Economist…….. But today I just happen to be reading it while waiting for someone, when I came across an article on Barry Bonds. Everyone by now knows Bond’s story, but this article was different. Chuck Klosterman put the blame on us, on our own apathy, and you know what, he’s right.

In November 2000, the United States held a presidential election, and nobody knew who won, so we just kind of made up an outcome and tried to act like that was normal. Less than a year later, airplanes flew into office buildings, and everybody cried for two months. And then Enron went bankrupt, and the U.S. started acting like a rogue state, and “The Simple Life” premiered, and gasoline became unaffordable, and our Olympic basketball team lost to Puerto Rico, and we reelected the same president we never really elected in the first place. Later, there would be some especially devastating hurricanes and three Oscars for an especially bad movie called “Crash.”

Things, as they say, have been better.

I’m only 33 years old, so I’ll concede that my life experience is limited. But the past five years have been an especially depressing stretch to be an American, and I don’t think many people of any age would disagree with that sentiment (except for maybe Kelly Clarkson … things seem to be working out OK for her). If it’s the era of anything, it’s the Era of Predictable Disillusionment: a half-decade in which many long-standing fears about how America works (and what America has come to represent) were gradually — and then suddenly — hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who hadn’t been paying attention to begin with.

This will not be lost on future historians. In 50 or 100 years, they will search for events within the popular culture that supposedly embodied the zeitgeist of the time. Some of these people will use sports, not unlike the way contemporary historians might use Muhammad Ali as a means to define the 1960s. As these future historians try to explain what was wrong with the world in the early 21st century, I suspect they will use Barry Bonds. Here was a man accomplishing unbelievable things — things so unbelievable that they literally should not have been believed, even as they were happening. But we did not really believe or disbelieve. We just sort of watched it happen, and then we watched it get out of control, and then we expressed shock without feeling a grain of surprise, and then we tried to figure out how we were supposed to reconcile an alien reality we unconsciously understood all along. So if you’re wondering how to feel about Barry’s passing Babe, here’s one option: You can feel like you’re experiencing how the present tense will be understood in the future.