[This Commentary originally appeared in the April 12, 1990 issue of The Mendon-Honeoye Falls-Lima Sentinel.]
Yes, I’ve lived in Western New York all my life, but the crazy April snowstorms we get still strike me as silly. “April showers bring May flowers.” I can’t recall any lyrics dealing with April snowstorms.
Once silliness infiltrates my mind, it doesn’t require a whole lot of effort for other absurdities to encroach upon the various unemployed synapses and neurons. For material, one merely needs to review current events…
Brent Musberger. I never enjoyed watching Brent Musberger, so you’d think I’d be happy CBS canned him. Wrong. The truth is I never enjoyed CBS Sports. I would occasionally tune in, but only if it involved watching the Superbowl or a Bills game. I watched NBC for baseball and the AFC and I viewed ABC for Monday Night Football, the Indy 500 and boxing every now and then. (I reacted solemnly when CBS outbid NBC for baseball broadcasting rights.)
Now, with Brent gone, I fear CBS may attempt to procure either Bob Costas or Al Michaels – two announcers I really enjoy. I guess I’ll watch CBS for the All-Star Game and the World Series, but I’d much prefer Bob or Al where they are now. If CBS really needs to swipe someone for baseball, why don’t they get Tony Kubek.
Worse yet, with Brent off the CBS map, there’s a chance he might end up on NBC or ABC. Yuck! Then I’d have to put up with him in order to see my favorite sports events. One the other hand, he might sign with ESPN. I wouldn’t mind that. I don’t get cable.
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The Drop in the Japanese Stock Market. Ha! I love it.
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Mario Cuomo and the New York State Budget Fiasco. I really think someone ought to come up with an incentive pay program for our elected officials. One idea – they get paid based on measurable performance (like getting the budget approved on time). Another idea – failure to perform as a body for the collective good of the public (like balancing the budget) would prohibit them from running for reelection.
Tough words? Yes. Too idealistic? Maybe. Unreasonable? Definitely not! Corporate officers and directors often have strict incentives tied to monetary bonuses and even to their continued employment. I can’t see why we don’t legislate accountability into our State Law Books.
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The Baseball Lockout. Self-explanatory silliness. See above section.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t know, I haven’t seen the movie yet. Of course, anything involving Jim Henson can’t be all that bad. Personally, though, I’m tired of seeing them in print.
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Time Opens Old Wounds. Yes, I know time should heal all wounds, but Time appears to have renewed the Nixon bashing of old. Too bad. While Watergate was pretty stupid, Nixon on the whole was probably our country’s most significant post-war pre-Reagan president. It’s a shame he has to continue to defend himself. It’s a far greater shame our nation has such an unforgiving liberal press.
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Bush vs. Broccoli. “It’s not easy being green…” Or, should we sing, “It’s not easy eating greens…” I guess with Soviet communism on the wane, it only makes sense to begin focusing our national attention towards that eternal enemy of our children – vegetables.
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Iraq, Chemical Weapons and Nuclear Triggers. Not the kinds of things we want the kids bringing home from school. Actually, I’m just glad no one’s found nuclear triggers in any Greyhound buses.
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Patriot’s Day. A little known Massachusetts holiday passed by wealthy New Yorkers so they could postpone paying their taxes for a few more days.
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Tulips and the Spring Skiing Season. If you like the former, then you’re apt to tell those who like the latter to move to the North Pole. Otherwise, folks, you only have 257 shopping days before Christmas. Have a happy Easter and a wonderful Passover.
Last Week #54: The Amazing FETA! (originally published on April 5, 1990)
Next Week #56: Earth Day and Kodak Bashing (originally published on April 19, 1990)
[What is this and why is here? See Interested in Discovering My Time Machine? for more details.]
Author’s Comment: First a bit of background. Although it seems rather easy, it’s pretty tough writing a weekly column. Not only do you have to come up with an interesting topic (there are far more uninteresting topics than interesting topics), but you have to be able to say something interesting for 1,000 words. You can always come up with at least a few interesting topics, but you can’t always come up with 1,000 interesting words about any one of those topics. This is the type of article that results when you hit one of those weeks. You take your handful of topics and write a paragraph or two about each of them, hoping you can tie the whole bundle together with a string of metaphor.
This particular little time capsule strikes me as filled with irony from the very beginning. At the time of writing, the network sports banquet had remained as it had been for a generation. I wrote as if it would never change. I was wrong. I now watch mostly CBS because they show the AFC (and the Bills). Brent did go to ABC, but he announces college football, something I generally tend to avoid (except for an occasional Bowl game and the Harvard-Yale game). Oh, and now I get cable and watch ESPN regularly.
Twenty-one years later, we have another Governor Cuomo but this time, again, with delicious irony, the complaint he avoided making the hard decisions precisely at a point when he had the political capital and the public is more interested in quality (a good long term budget) than quantity (getting the budget done on time).
In 1990, it was a baseball lockout. In 2011, it was a football lockout. Both reek of silliness.
And maybe that is the accidental point – no matter where or when you are, silliness reins (or, given the April Fool’s Snor’easter we got one year, silliness snows).