Charlie Rose

JohnGelles  08/21/2011 07:57 PM Report

A viewer-commentator from these pages today asked about this archives competition for STARS beneath the titles. It's our most obvious sport. This interview got 3 out of 5 possible stars.

Our viewer wanted to know how we can vote in the game.

I would like to know too.

The Arnold Palmer hour I would give 5 stars.

On the other hand, a better test will someday be devised when the audience is quizzed on the interview to see who really watched it and paid attention to what it meant.

JohnGelles  08/21/2011 07:44 PM Report

To "love" professional sports, as a fan (and often a player at low levels of the sport -- as a beginner or later in various schools or leagues), gives ordinary people remarkable feelings of being on the inside of their world not outside it.

Baseball was the fans paradise when I was younger. I'm not sure where that insiders paradise is now.

My children and grandchildren have excelled at basket ball, golf and hockey. I have sometimes cared about tennis or even the Olympics (whose professional status I no longer know anything about). But at a month short of 86, politics and economics are my current sport.

So I listened to Jerry Jones wondering if his sport is a zero sum game or not.

Is it winner take all? Or do the teams cooperate enough to reduce sports injuries a little bit every year?

It is taken for granted that sports and their fields for competition are necessary -- if a nation's war fighters are to be capable of defending such values as democracy and human rights.

It is said that our nation's terrorist enemies use training camps to turn NFL types (if they can find them,) or pansies, into pit bulls without honor of any kind.

I was tuned all this Sunday to the talking heads on the weekly shows that fear our winner take all economies are soon liable to explode in our face.

I think we will reform them enough to prevent that.

And what about the TV audience for Superbowl 6004 sometime or other tomorrow?

We (all of us) could care less. As Jack Parr once almost said, "if you's seen one game, you've see them all." I think so.

If you've heard one expert in political economy, especially in its history, you've hear them all.

But I also today watched Charlie Rose talk of architecture with an Israeli-born world class architect of Syrian Jewish ancestry, from McGill and Harvard and residing in Boston, with work to be studied and visited in Montreal, Israel and all over the world.

His game is as far from zero-sum as a human being can go. You can never have enough experience of architecture if you were to live forever.

So thank you Charlie Rose for being a fan of popular sports and just about everything else your audience loves.