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

Abstract

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 doom. In an op-ed piece entitled Feminization of our Culture, syndicated columnist Mona Charen used the public's grieving to lament the lousy voting record of ill-informed, 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 ... aridity and felt insignificance that they relish for vicarious involvement in large events. He termed emotional exhibitionism, the fact that shared about a stranger who `made a difference' although she 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 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 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. …