February 13, 2010
Christopher Hitchens and Claudius Galenus on Sports
Dave Zirin in The Nation:
Nuance is the mortal enemy of essayist Christopher Hitchens. Whether it's his rapturous support for Bush's Iraq invasion or his best-selling dismissal (God is NOT Good) of religion, Hitchens will always eschew a surgical analysis for the rhetorical amputation. Beneath the Oxford education, he has become Thomas Friedman in an ascot, with all the subtlety of a blowtorch.
Now Hitchens has turned his attention to sports and the ensuing essay in Newsweek, called "Fool's Gold: How the Olympics and other international competitions breed conflict and bring out the worst in human nature" is everything you might fear. I'm no fan of the politics that surround the Olympic games but when Hitchens takes out his dull saw, nothing connected to sports is spared.
More here. In defense of Hitchens, I also present somethin written by the Roman physician Galen a couple of thousand years ago, and unearthed (for me, I mean) by Justin E. H. Smith:
All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that athletes have never even dreamed of mental blessings. To begin with, they are so deficient in reasoning powers that they do not even know whether they have a brain. Always gorging themselves on flesh and blood, they keep their brains soaked in so much filth that they are unable to think accurately and are as mindless as dumb animals.
Perhaps it will be claimed that athletes achieve some of the physical blessings. Will they claim the most important blessing of all: health? You will find no one in a more treacherous physical condition... Their sleep is also immoderate. When normal people have ended their work and are hungry, athletes are just getting up from their naps. In fact, their lives are like those of pigs, except that pigs do not overexert or force feed themselves...
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:22 AM | Permalink
Comments
Re: Galen
Almost makes me regret those 2 years I played hockey in high school.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Feb 13, 2010 2:47:11 PM
CH:
"(Incidentally, isn't there something simultaneously grandiose and pathetic about the words "World Cup"? Not unlike the micro-megalomaniac expression "World Series" for a game that only a handful of countries bother to play.)"
The World Series got its name, originally, from the sponsor of the championship play-off games in baseball. The sponsor was a newspaper called The World. I forget the years in which they had the sponsorship.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Feb 14, 2010 1:21:48 AM
I think everybody else has forgotten too, Norman.
***
I loved Hitchens's line "All I ask is that they keep out of the grown-up parts of the paper."
(Although, a lot of my friends tell me that some of the best writing, a least in the Chicago Tribune, is to be found in the sports section.)
Posted by: Bryon | Feb 14, 2010 6:48:50 AM
In contradiction to dear old Hitchens, "All I ask is that they read the grown-up parts of the paper."
Posted by: Alice de Tocqueville | Feb 14, 2010 12:24:07 PM
Post a comment