Princess Diana and Baseball: Encouraging the Critics of Culture to Play Fair

Conversation and Commentary Feminist scholars long have evinced an interest not only in explaining the world, but also in changing it for the better. In feminist scholarship these goals are not always separable, but sometimes advocacy needs its own place. This section of the journal is devoted to essays that do not take the form of traditional academic research articles. Short advocacy pieces or conversations about women's scholarship and advocacy will be published here. Having come of age among Kansas City Royals fans, I've long considered pennant fever as part of autumn's familiar rhythms, a ritual as familiar and inevitable as raking leaves. Yet, in these final frenzied weeks of America's favorite pastime, I'm reminded how last month some found in those other Royals fans--the predominately female mourners of Princess Diana--a recipe for democratic doom. In an op-ed piece entitled "The Feminization of our Culture," syndicated columnist Mona Charen used the public's grieving to lament the lousy voting record of ill-informed, emotional women. Time essayist, Charles Krauthammer, worded whether a "democratic public so enthralled by Di's dresses" has the independence and wits to self govern. The trophy for irony, however, went to Newsweek's George Will, who as it happens, is an unapologetic baseball fan. Diana's death evoked "mass hysteria," he wrote, saying "Evidently ... millions lead lives of such ... emotional aridity and felt insignificance that they relish any opportunity for vicarious involvement in large events." He termed "emotional exhibitionism," the fact that "strangers" shared "their feelings" about a "stranger" who " `made a difference' " although she "never made laws or poetry or shoes...." Only a society steeped in "childishness," he concluded, could be so "fixated" on persons who live in playful "luxury," have no "memory of productive labor," and never publicly utter "any serious thought." Sounds to me, George, as if the Diana phenomenon is a lot like baseball. In truth, the brief Diana spectacle paled beside the excesses of another emotional, irrational cultural obsession: sports. In this "masculinization of our culture," sports scores, injuries, trades, and other intrigues masquerade as "news" each day at 6:00 and 11:00. Several days this month, no poet, manufacturer, or legislator captured banner headlines in my Boston Globe. Rather, front-page space went to New England football players and their owner who had threatened to move the team out of state. In countless homes, every weekend, holiday, many Mondays and other days, sponsfans glue themselves to TV to seize, in Will's words, the "opportunity for vicarious involvement in large events." Some cable stations, in fact, show only sports events, analysis, and interviews with multi-million dollar players whose most "serious" utterance is about "giving it 110 per cent." In waiting rooms, airports, and bars, sportsfans share "feelings" with strangers about "strangers" who "make a difference" by excelling at games most of us last played as children. And few acts of "emotional exhibitionism" rival those by manic fans who don bizzare costumes, paint themselves in team colors, curse officials, engage in brawls, and cry, yes, cry, if their beloved team loses. Lest some of Krauthammer's noble independent thinkers question whether this fixation borders on "childishness," all sorts of folks step to the plate to assure them otherwise. Books about baseball's myths and rituals, its role models, its importance to the American psyche are a cottage industry. Financially strapped schools still underwrite dozens of sports to foster town-gown "community" and institutional "identification." And in Ken Burns's eighteen-hour televised love affair with baseball, besotted fans (including George Will) witnessed to the game's spiritual worth. (Will, in fact, expounds on baseball's sanctity in multiple columns of recent days. …