Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504260001
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
To this once but perhaps not future baseball fan, the end of the "work stoppage" (i.e., strike) and assurances it'll be a season without "replacement players" (i.e., scabs) have brought precious little joy.
It's too late for that. The 1994 season was ruined; the '95 season will be 18 games shy of a full load; the point of it all - negotiating a new labor contract between players and owners - still hasn't been resolved.
Much of the appeal of the game lay in its commitment to the ideal of bringing order out of chaos. Three up, three down; do that thrice three without interruption and you have a perfect game.
The commitment has been eroding for years. The designated-hitter rule, for example, undermined the symmetrical principle that he who hits must also take the field, and vice versa, or else bear the penalty of removal from the game. Because the American League embraced it while the National League has not, the change also undermined the consistency of baseball rules.
But that's minor-league stuff compared to the destruction of an entire season last year, and the insouciant belief this year, by both owners and players, that they can just resume play as if nothing much happened.
In the March issue of the News Letter of the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, political scientist Larry Sabato makes the point that policy issues in the 1994 U.S. Senate race played second fiddle to character questions about incumbent Democrat Charles Robb and Republican challenger Oliver North. Sabato's evident regret that a better class of major-party nominees did not emerge - he titled the article "The Senate Race From Hell" - is no doubt shared by many, probably most, other Virginians.
I don't disagree. But judging from exit-poll results reported in the article, I have to wonder whether a campaign on "the issues" rather than character would have been a whole lot better.
According to those polls, the three most important policy issues for Virginia voters were crime, family values/morality and education, in that order.
But crime control and public education are essentially state functions. This was an election for federal office; the federal role in crime control and education is marginal. And the application of the term "family values" to politics has nearly emptied it of meaning. Instead, it has become a rhetorical flourish available to orators for either side of any question.
The issue in fourth place - "economy/jobs" - makes more sense. Federal fiscal and monetary policy has a bearing on economic performance. Issues like welfare reform and defense spending, over which a U.S. senator might conceivably have considerable influence, were far down on the list.
Who by now doesn't know about the Internet and the various commercial computer networks linked to it, and hasn't at least heard about the wonderful new global discourse that worldwide electronic mail is creating?
So far, though, the discourse isn't proving so wonderful. According to Gary Chapman, director of The 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin, "the peculiar features of computer communication are amplifying the decline of our national mores and manners."
Bigotry, misogyny, aliases, lying and flaming diatribes are becoming so commonplace, and are intruding so much on civilized talk, he writes in The New Republic, that many veteran users have given up on computer networks as a conversation forum.
The hope is that this is just a passing phase - that, as Chapman puts it, the medium is at the moment moving from childhood to adolescence, but eventually will emerge into mature adulthood.
The fear is that electronic conversation, lacking such features as tone-of-voice and visual cues, is inherently prone to misunderstandings and rapid escalation of hostility - that it will prove to be not the great conversation-builder as heralded but one more contributor to conversation's decline.
by CNB