Winners, Losers . . . And the Rest of Us
A dialogue you might enjoy listening in on. It started with a comment Ron left on the preceding post.
Ron: People don’t have a language for praising/understanding non-winners. They immediately think ‘loser’, and can’t understand people who just won’t play.
Ron: Something that has changed also is that we have given up any notion of a “good try” or “fair play” having any particular virtue. It is somewhat cynically assumed that winners “write the history” so who cares about playing fair!
I wonder how much of this “winnerism” is a backlash to an increased theraputic/egalitarian (hmmm… feminized?) culture?
The virtue of teaching people sports is that it shows you how to lose, and losing occurs a lot in life. But now we just consign losers to gehenna…
Amba: My father once pointed out that for every team that wins a baseball pennant, — ? — I don’t know the correct numbers now — 11? have to lose. He thought about writing a book called “Losing: A Baseball Odyssey.” Never did, though.
Ron: A great Hitter in baseball fails 7 times out of 10! Humbling…
But why do you think they take steroids…because a clean loser would still be thought of as a loser; we beat on winners who take drugs, but ignore clean losers. Being ignored in America is worse than being a villain.
Amba: There’s a big world of non-winners out there. We’re like dark matter.
Only the stars shine, but we’ve got mass, baby.
Ron: and Charm! and odd motion in the Z axis! err…skip that one.
Ambiance 