29 Jul 2002

Mon, 29 Jul 2002

Ron Borges' Lance Armstrong Piece Provokes A Response

I read this piece with considerable ire yesterday: Great Feat But Not A Great Athlete by Ron Borges on MSNBC. After calming down and considering what incredible envy and provincialism inspires work like this, I decided to write a parody. What follows is the original text from Borges' article, edited for humorous effect.

Update: Ugo Cei picks up the story here, where he says, "I liked David Watson's parody of this piece by Ron Borges on MSNBC. But somehow I think he was too gentle with that stupid chauvinist who seems to think that basket, baseball, athletics and football (of the American kind, not soccer) are the only sports worth considering when one seeks out to find the greates athlete in the world."

You know, Ugo, the things that I was thinking were so vulgar as to be unprintable. My piece would probably have been a lot funnier had I just spewed those thoughts into the blog, but in retrospect I'm glad I left room for people like you with an international flair to put this guy in his place. That's why I used the word provincial, a word that I often use to describe the local yocals here in Pittsburgh. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought that Borges was from Pittsburgh.

Someone postulated on National Public Radio a week or so ago that Ron Borges was the greatest sports writer in the world. Greatest sports writer in the world? I wonder if he’s a writer at all.

Certainly Borges is a hell of a sports writer, but does that make him superior to Frank DeFord, Fred Bowen, Howard Ullman, or Stephen Wilson? Does it make him a better sports writer than Ken Peters? Does the ability to sit on a thickly padded office chair for hours on end and pump your fingers like a madman make you a great sports writer or merely a guy who does better without Hukt On Foniks than most people?

If Borges is a great sports writer, so are coal miners. Coal miners, for my money, must do more with their bodies than pump their fingers up and down. If that’s all it took, the Playstation addicts next door would have to be considered the greatest sports writers of all time.

On Sunday, Borges wrote a mediocre sports article for the fourth straight time. This is a great feat in his line of work, so good for him, but who really cares?

For the past two weeks, there were regular reports about how the American-bred frontal lobotomy survivor was going to catch the field of mostly foreign sports writers after they capitulated with another article about bicycling.

A few brainless men and women got quite excited about it, although Borges has done it with the kind of regularity that has made more than a few advocates of this fringe journalism wonder if he’s typing on heroin while his competitors are (mostly) drinking beer.

That a man can race around an office on a typewriter and live to tell about it is a noble feat, although I’d think more of it if he actually was using his brain. It would be more of a feat if he was forced to dine on dog food each night too and then lug those heavy Kibbles and Bits around with him the next morning. After a week of that it would be the National Enquirer because nobody would be reading his meaningless drivel.

Borges’ accomplishment was most certainly difficult, but so is the National YoYo Championship, and no one goes on National Public Radio and argues the winner is the best sports writer in the world. He’s just a guy who operates a yoyo better than the rest of us.

I would argue the same is true of Borges. He can type better than anyone. He probably didn’t even need Hukt On Foniks. But is he anything more than a highly paid typist?

How fast is he when they take the typewriter away? Is he as fast as Andrew Sullivan? Is he as fast as Dave Winer?

For my money, being the greatest sports writer in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your brain do things that defy description. Chief among them is not pumping your fingers up and down while your feet are strapped to a pair of Birkenstocks.

Do not misunderstand me. Ron Borges’ feat of typing a sports article for the fourth time is deserving of praise and recognition.

If you want, you can even argue that it is a great sporting feat. After all, there are people out there who actually think sports writing is a journalistic endeavor, although I feel if it is, so is the National Enquirer.

In recent years, a minority of media members in America have tried desperately to convince us that fringe journalism such as sports writing must be given it's due. It is a passion of theirs to try and convince the rest of us International sophisticates that the less we see of something the better it really is.

Fine for them. Just don’t be trying to give away the title of world’s greatest sports writer to a moron from the US who sits on a padded office chair for nine hours a day careening through the annals of pseudo-journalism, dark though those annals might be.

Praise Borges' grit, his determination and his fast fingers. But don’t try to convince me he’s the world’s greatest sports writer. First try to convince me he’s a writer at all.

Posted at: 08:22 | permalink

There Is No Spoon: Illusions of Freedom

In a definitive piece on blogging entitled Illusions of Freedom—Kantian Divisions in an Electronic Age, There Is No Spoon writes, 'In this paper, I argue that whether the Web changes the form of our elections (which is doubtful), or whether we get our daily “news” from a trusted blogger instead of a compromised corporate media outlet (which, again, does not seem to be in the cards for the majority of Americans, let alone the rest of the the world’s population), is largely irrelevant. Neither of these developments will change the underlying fact that the web has been unable to deliver on its socially progressive potential because it has been “born” into capitalism, a socioeconomic system that creates and depends upon the same “hierarchical classification systems” Berners-Lee would like the Web to eliminate. Further, I will argue that the crucial “hierarchical classification systems” upon which capital depends—the great divisions between public and private spheres—can be traced to, and are authorized by, Kant’s Enlightenment thinking. Using blogs and bloggers as exemplars, this paper will explore the implications of the Enlightenment’s divided worldview to demonstrate how starting from this division only deepens and perpetuates the problems the division purports to solve.' Check it out.

Posted at: 00:35 | permalink