Excess: The World Series of Desolation

It’s another weird day in New York, mainly because one of our sports teams won a trophy last night. I had to laugh as the victors reminded the press of how Mr. Steinbrenner had built that wonderful new stadium for them to play in — fact is that at least a third of the cost to build it actually came (guess where) out of the wallets of taxpayers. The wealthy (and all these ballplayers, from A-Rod to the third-string bench warmer, are wealthy beyond the imagination of most of us) will leave out such details, because to the rich, support from the nameless taxpaying serfs of society is not merely an expectation, it’s an entitlement, an assumed condition of their privilege.

In this respect, the Yankees are no different from Goldman or Citi or AIG, with the sole exception being that at least the baseball team gives something back, a product that can be appreciated for whatever value it holds to the mind of the receiver. Baseball is truly a great and beautiful game, so it is doubly unfortunate that most ordinary folk can only experience it by looking at an electronic box. The alliance with wealth and privilege has its long-term costs, and baseball, like investment banking and the insurance industry, will inevitably suffer from the divorce it has initiated from the people.

Excess in any form is an addiction, whether the addiction takes the form of impulsive profit-taking (on credit default swaps or $2,500 box seats), insider trading, or steroids. The consequences of the obsession with excess, both for individuals and for society at large, are the same as they are for more familiar addictions, such as those to heroine or alcohol. If our recent past of wars of occupation, corporate greed, socio-economic division, and planetary destruction have not taught us the ominous price of excess and its dark cult, then we have learned nothing.

Sport is one reflection of a culture. During baseball’s heyday in this nation, its workers — the players — were a part of the middle class, even amid their renown as athletes. Most spent their winters working jobs that you or I would do; and most of us grew up playing the games that these athletes made their profession. In other words, there was a symbiosis: the fans played the game of the professionals, and the workers of baseball joined their fans in the working world during the off-season.

A personal story is worth telling in this context: when my oldest brother was a youngster (this is before I was born), he wanted to write a school report about his hero, Mickey Mantle. It so happened that Mantle lived at the time in the same town in New Jersey as our family did then. So young John Donohue went one day to Mantle’s house, rang the doorbell, and asked for an interview. He was invited in and got to talk with the Mick himself; and I’m sure the report was a great success.

That symbiosis, that human connection, is gone now, and we see these athletes only on television programs and on the covers of glossy gossip magazines. The human reality of A-Rod or Jeter is as alien to me as that of Vikram Pandit or Lloyd Blankfein.

Young as I am, even I can recall a time when commodities traders and insurance executives lived on the same block with me. No more: they have gone to a McMansion in Westchester or an estate in Connecticut, with a summer villa at the Hamptons. The people living on my block today are mostly the servants of those traders and executives. Most of them are young people who share living space, often two or three to an apartment; the rest are working families with latchkey children (and, of course, an increasing number are like me, unemployed). In short, the American Dream has become the American Fantasy: society is increasingly divided between those who are living the Fantasy in the isolation of wealth, privilege, and exclusiveness; and those who live it vicariously, via a cable TV hookup. For all who are caught in its grip, the cult of excess is a desolate, desperate, and ultimately dangerous realm.