Boring ourselves to death

Not too long ago, Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban took the media to task for its fascination with salaries of entertainment figures (athletes included) as well as how much it costs to make a movie or buy a team, etc.

Basically, Cuban wondered why salaries of rich people were so important to media types and why the financial side was always centered on the wealthy.

He wrote:

If making salaries public is so important, why don't reporters disclose their salaries? If weekly box office is so important, why don't newspapers report daily sales and subscription numbers? If box office is the ultimate reflection of the quality of a movie, shouldn't a newspaper, or magazines ' daily or by issue sales be a reflection of the quality of that issue?

It's not hypocritical is it?

Hearing Cuban on the subject made me look back to see if I wrote about individual salaries and how much money people make. Guess what? I did. A lot. Worse, I'm not even sure I noticed what I was doing. In retrospect, I suppose, I wrote about such things without even thinking – a salary, it seems, is just another statistic like batting average or ERA. And like those stats, salary figured in whether or not a player could be moved or if others could be acquired.

But the part that is mystifying is that salaries never interested me nor did it really indicate anything to me about a person. The fact that Chase Utley recently signed such a large contract is not interesting at all. It proves nothing and doesn't make Utley smarter or a better player. It's meaningless.

Needless to say, these types of ideas are not in line with conventional thinking. Actually, it's more like if the world is a rat race then it's OK to be a rat. Perhaps because of the way I was raised – in my bourgeoisie-ness with that safe and sound middle-class safety net where deeds and ideas are the most important thing, failure is easily fixed, and the total pursuit of money is viewed as a tacky move of a Philistine – I was never motivated by money. That’s both good and bad, but we’ll leave that alone for now.

The point is that I never really thought much about advertising another man’s salary simply because he was paid a lot of money and was on a professional baseball team. At the heart of it, Cuban was railing against people like me and he was/is correct.

But it gets deeper than that, too. Over the past two days regular readers of this site have been “treated” to a few not-so-subtle jabs at Jon Lieber’s purchase of a $211,000 truck, that, frankly, I find superficial, wasteful and disgusting for many, many reasons. But at the same time, I don’t know if I’m more disgusted that Lieber enjoyed flaunting his vehicle that cost about the same amount as the median price of a single-family home in the U.S. or the media’s coverage of it.

Maybe what Cuban meant to write was that stories like this aren’t just hypocritical, they’re boring. Worse, it seems as if the media is more focused on the wealthy and superficial than the things that really matter.

As of the January 15, 2007, the war in Iraq costs the U.S. $229 million a day, but space on web sites and newspapers is given to a guy with an expensive car because he can throw a baseball reasonably well.

Good.

I don’t think anything will change, and I’m not about to wage a war against the celebrity culture and frivolousness. For one, I can’t win, and for another, I’m a participant. Overcoming personal hypocrisy and contradictions is never easy.

But at least someone is taking notice. In a story in the National Journal, William Powers points out that the media’s fascination with wealth has become trite and ubiquitous.

Powers writes:

Stories about the rich are nothing new. Wealth is intrinsically interesting, and extreme wealth all the more so. You see a piece about the grandiose estates the hedge-fund crowd has been building in Greenwich, Conn., the new capital of conspicuous consumption, and some mix of admiration, envy, disgust and pure voyeurism naturally pulls you in. The mega-rich have always been a nice cottage industry for the news media, and there's nothing wrong in that.

But we've crossed some line in recent years. The press covers these people not just as the narrow slice of society that they are, but more and more as the only slice that matters; not as exotic exceptions to the cultural norm, but as the norm itself. This is especially true in the leisure/lifestyle realm, where the market for eight-figure houses is sometimes covered as if it were a popular trend.

More importantly:

Indeed, the media are so saturated with the very wealthy, the story line is losing its novelty. When covering human excess, a less-is-more approach is the way to keep 'em coming. By normalizing the very rich, journalists are making them boring, which is the opposite of news.

Meanwhile, the old middle class -- remember them? -- is taking on a strange magnetism. Did you know there are actually Americans who live very happily on five-figure incomes, without a single pied-a-terre? It's so amazing, it almost feels like a story.

Full disclosure: I’m driving a 1998 Honda Accord with 136,000 miles on it. The car is blue, was recently inspected, and hopefully ready for 136,000 more miles. For some reason my golf clubs are still stashed in the trunk, too. I also drive a Saturn Vue that we bought in 2004. It’s black and drives fairly smooth even though I intentionally drove it into a pile of petrified plowed snow this morning… not a good idea. The front-wheel drive is no match for ice.

In Clearwater…
Pitching coach Rich Dubee wants the Phillies’ catchers to take more proprietorship in calling games.

In Lancaster…
It appears as if the snow and ice still hasn’t been removed (don’t get me started), however, nothing could stop the J.P. McCaskey Red Tornadoes from winning a third straight Lancaster-Lebanon League championship on Friday night in Hershey, Pa.

The Tornadoes whipped Lancaster Catholic by 29 points for the largest victory in the league’s championship game. The victory also gave McCaskey 10 league championships in 34 seasons and it is just the second school to win three in a row.

No L-L League team has ever won four in a row, but with 10 of the 14 players for McCaskey slated to return next season it’s going to be hard to stop them.