Facts in the Way of Opinion
There was a news item a little while back about how some of the top people in boxing were indicted for taking bribes to fix fighter rankings. Now anyone who would have been surprised that boxing promoters are corrupt, maybe I can sell you a nice bridge to Brooklyn? Actually, the only surprise is how long it took the Justice Department to indict. And why in the world is Don King still a free man?
For those who don’t understand, boxing is like wrestling, only boxers are too dumb to fake it. Ask Mohammed Ali about those butterflies in front of his eyes. It’s not enough that the people involved in boxing from the fighters to the broadcasters support an activity where people try to jar one another’s brains loose from their skulls. But to cheat at it seems merely endemic.
It’s kind of strange how we have organized our social structure with mores, rules, and laws. The incongruities and hypocrisy would be laughable, if they weren’t at such a cost. Like boxing. Or that other lethal enterprise we officially call organized crime.
Doesn’t it strike you as somewhat strange that newspapers regularly call someone "known to be a member of a such-’n-such organized crime family"? I mean, if the newspapers know, then surely the police know...since they told the newspapers.
So why then aren’t the crooks in jail? If we know they are crooks, why haven’t we written laws to put them away? Lack of political leadership? Cowardice? Who knows; it’s just one of those incongruities again.
Another is how much we apparently we abhor homosexuals and drug addicts, and how compassionate we are towards people with AIDS. Consider that roughly 90% of AIDS fatalities in the United States were either shooting heroin or had an average of more than 11-hundred sexual partners. And we’ve spent $40-billion dollars trying to figure out why they died?
Finally on the matter of incongruities, and you may think this something of a stretch, but there is a local high school that thinks it should continue to field a football team every fall. This year, they lost all ten games, giving up an average of almost 60 points a game. They just tied their own record for consecutive losses at 35 games, a humiliation they last visited in 1991. Maybe they should look into lacrosse or field hockey.
My father jokes that it is a family tradition not to let facts stand in the way of opinion. Hohoho. That’s fine when you’re reviewing a film you haven’t seen, but such an attitude gets in the way of the smooth operation of the planet.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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