A few years ago when the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (a.k.a March Madness, a.k.a. The Big Dance) began, a co-worker distributed brackets to everyone’s mailbox, inviting everyone to participate in what has become something of a national sport in its own right: the office pool. Another co-worker responded with a mock bracket (names of countries instead of schools, etc.), calling on us to pay attention to the real March madness, the war in Afghanistan. I found the gesture more than a little self-righteous (one could walk into any restaurant any day of the week and try to induce shame by proclaiming that there are people in the world, yea in our very nation, dying of starvation that very moment), but not because I thought the tournament was more important than the war. This brief and even trivial scuffle points, I think, to a larger problem facing American progressives, namely, that even as we desire a more just world, we must negotiate the fact that simply by virtue of living where we do it is impossible not to benefit, if only indirectly, from injustice or inequality. Naiveté is no longer a good faith option, but a life in which every glass of water has an aftertaste of guilt seems truly unlivable, so we live somewhere in the vast space between true indifference and a life devoid of pleasure, comfort, or self-interest. The issue then is how we negotiate, how we organize our micro-economies of time, money, and values --choosing which battles to fight and recognizing which things are truly battles.

Around the same time as the Madness incident, I was struck by a well-written scene on the once at least great-seeming The West Wing. Arguing with the resident staff Republican Ainsley Hayes (Emily Proctor) about gun control, Rob Lowe’s character Sam Seaborn tries to shut down her arguments about second amendment rights, self-defense and so on, with the line “Some people just like guns.” She responds by saying yes, alright, that’s true; and some people just don’t like people who like guns. For me this was an instance of how, in its own Mamet-lite way, The West Wing occasionally approached a kind of honesty clearly lacking in public political discourse today, which is all about slippery slopes and smack-downs. I don’t understand why it angers some people to think of two men holding hands on their way to get espresso, but the Left is also (not necessarily equally) hampered by cultural prejudice disguised as rational and moral policy. There are a lot of good reasons for better gun control laws, and for stricter enforcement of the ones we have, but the fact that some have a visceral dislike of possum hunting or gun-racks on pick-up trucks isn’t one of them. Until we can own up to this, the suspicions of gun-owners that the anti-gun movement, for example, is as much an assault on a way of life as it is an effort to reduce violence will continue to have just enough of a grain of truth to keep the NRA energized.

Surely any cultural event on the scale of March Madness can be read in more than one way. I’ll happily grant that the pleasures of sports telespectatorship are, for those with broadly lefty tendencies, contradictory, but I know of few pleasures that aren’t. Even if we grant that the Big Dance serves an ideological function (as a simulacrum of meritocracy, a utopian stage on which the significance of race is temporarily suspended, in short nachos and circuses), we should not forget that ideologies are not simply bad things. While by definition they hinder real or permanent solutions, they also express and anticipate solutions in ways that are both historically and existentially important. When in his classic formulation of ideology Marx writes that religion is the opiate of the masses, it is not entirely with contempt.

So what are we injecting these days? Based on the sense of national crisis expressed by the recent congressional hearings, mostly steroids. Much to my surprise, I found there to be something vaguely moving about the vigilant, earnest, and even idealistic truth-seeking of the committee, but soon realized that its theatrical power was rooted in its being a period piece, something from a different era or a parallel universe: where have these guys been for the last five years? (I can’t resist pointing out here that the current president was a long-time user of illegal drugs and the owner of a baseball team during what is now being called “the steroid era”). In a kind of inverted image of my colleague’s annoyance at the office pool, Congress is simply giving too much importance to sports, trying to make them mean something they can't --not by wanting to get rid of them, but by purifying them through an elaborate secular ritual. I have to agree that, although we have more pressing problems, a world without illegal steroid use would indeed be a slightly better place.

On the other hand, no one has shown me why the world would be better off without NCAA basketball, even though some people just don't like people who like basketball. My utopia includes March Madness as well as Proust and justice. To paraphrase a line frequently attributed to Emma Goldman: you don’t have to like the Big Dance for me to want to be part of your revolution, but it has to be okay that I do.

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