OPINION

The boor at the bar

I worked my way through college tending bar. Rock clubs, jazz clubs, even (yikes!!) discos, but also some places with less traffic, hotel and restaurant lounges where there might only be a couple guys sitting at the bar drowning their sorrows late at night.

Anyone who worked such places knew that the key to preserving peace and keeping the tip jar filled was to avoid two topics--religion and politics--because you didn't know whether the people on the bar stools were Democrats or Republicans, or which God they worshiped, if any.

Which left sports. You could always complain about how bad Fighting Illini football was (some things never change) and how basketball coach Lou Henson could take a squad of high school kids and win 21 games and a squad of NBA all-stars and win 22. Even if you had a Cubs fan sitting next to a Cardinals fan, they could still rib each other in good fun.

The point, though, was that sports was, to borrow a legal term, a "safe harbor," a refuge that conversation could retreat into because no one took it all that seriously.

The patrons didn't want to argue about politics; they just wanted to relax at the end of a long day with a cold beer or Jack and Coke. Their (and my) worst nightmare was the crank at the end of the bar who kept going on about how big a moron Jimmy Carter was or how we should nuke the Iranians.

Such memories return because of the way in which so many areas of life are now being relentlessly politicized by self-appointed activists intent upon shoving their unsolicited opinions in our faces, as if we are wayward children in need of their enlightened ministry.

It is ironic that those who most bemoan our political polarization are often the same folks who wish to politicize ever more aspects of our lives, apparently unaware that polarization is an inevitable consequence of politicization.

Indeed, there is no more efficient means of dividing Americans, of turning them against each other, than injecting politics into every nook and cranny. When this happens we are left with fewer ways and places to come together as a people without fear of giving offense.

When you can't attend your kids' school play or have a hot dog and a beer at a ballgame without receiving a political sermon, something has gone awry.

Yes, everyone has a constitutional right to spout ignorant political opinions, but some rights are also better off left unexercised in some circumstances.

There is also the sheer presump-tuousness of it all; more specifically, the assumption that folks having a good time at a Super Bowl party or simply catching some action thriller at the multiplex are so imbued with racism, sexism, and homophobia as to be in dire need of political re-education. And that late-night comics, professional athletes, and Hollywood actresses, with their deep levels of learning and exquisite appreciation of moral and ethical dilemmas, possess the necessary combination of knowledge and moral enlightenment to provide it.

Even those of us (perhaps especially those of us) who have spent our lives studying, teaching, and writing about politics want to be able to retreat from it on occasion ... actually, most occasions.

What belongs on the op-ed page of a newspaper is not necessarily what should be on Monday Night Football or at the church ice cream social.

Alas, as the boundaries between politics and entertainment become increasingly blurred, as a consequence of politics increasingly becoming a form of entertainment, we end up with late-night comics who feel qualified to instruct us about health care and gun control without knowing anything about health care or gun control, and ESPN sports-show hosts who lecture us about race relations but probably don't know what the 13th Amendment is or in what century the Civil War was fought.

It isn't just that we are being assaulted by political opinions, often in the most inappropriate and unlikely places, but that the opinions are coming from smug, pompous fools for whom a lack of knowledge is apparently no impediment to the propensity to bloviate and sermonize.

The hunch is that the boors at the end of the bar in my bartending days inwardly knew that they were just boors at the end of the bar and were used to being tuned out, but our contemporary boors for less than obvious reasons think they have something profound to say and also for less than obvious reasons think we desperately need to hear it.

They're the boors who are so oblivious that they don't know that they're just boors, the kind of folks who might read a book every third year or so but won't let that stop them.

The noted political theorist masquerading as NBC sportscaster Bob Costas recently referred to those who object to the intrusion of politics into sports, the shallow sorts among us who just want the scores and the play-by-play, as "mouth breathers."

Perhaps. Or maybe we're just people who might have tuned in to watch the game rather than hear the political opinions of Bob Costas.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 10/23/2017

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