Our Athletes Are Not Meant to Fit Our Ideologies
In case you missed it, The Daily Caller, the small dead tree on which Tucker Carlson has hung the remains of his career, probably to frighten off evil spirits and common decency, had a week that will live in the annals of American jackassery. Everybody knows about Caller correspondent Neil Munro's deft performance in the role of Obnoxious Subway Crazoid in the Rose Garden on Friday. However, all the noise surrounding that may well have caused you to miss what was perhaps the worst piece of writing about American sports since the last time Phil Mushnick saw a kid with his drawers drooping low.
It's rarely pretty when our young conservatives try to "hip" themselves to popular culture in general, but their attempts at wedging sports into the ongoing shouting match between the voices in their heads are usually the most hilarious. (A while back, The Weekly Standard essayed an all-sports issue that actual sportswriters laugh at to this day. I mean, honestly, Fred Barnes on the NBA? That would have been like sending young Bill Kristol to CBGB back in the day.) This is an attempt to enlist Bryce Harper, the authentic phenom of the Washington Nationals — and I'm not kidding, he came into Fenway and lit the joint on fire a week or so ago, and you you should see him if you have the chance — into the author's personal quest for a guest slot on Hannity.
(Apropos of nothing, I have simply got to get a copy of this guy's book on sex, rock and roll, and Catholicism — "Indeed, it is such a ubiquitous theme that it's impossible to run through my favorite bands without coming face-to-face with it. The punk group the Replacements, my favorite band when I was in my twenties, have a song called "I Will Dare," about working up the courage to meet a girl. The Allman Brothers sing of "Sweet Melissa." The entire Motown canon, from Marvin Gaye to Stevie Wonder, is a joyful soundtrack of the quest for love-more specifically, the quest for the love of that one person... — if only to read the lengthy exposition of how, say, "Let's Get It On" is really about the God-centered quest for monogamous love as demonstrated by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and not about Marvin's desire to seduce every woman in a 20-block radius. I don't even want to think about his interpretation of "Sexual Healing."
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/bryce-harper-9805894#ixzz1yRQb7iHA