The apathy vote | The Spectator

Basketball is more popular, and soccer-like, than ever

Basketball is one of America’s best exports. Back in 1992, NBA rosters featured only twenty-three foreign-born players from eighteen nations. That was the year the US Olympic “Dream Team,” starring Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, posterized its way to the gold medal by an average margin of forty-three points. The Dream Team helped spur a worldwide hoops boom that shows no signs of stalling. When a new NBA season tips off on October 24, there will be at least 120 foreign-born players from forty nations on league rosters. Basketball, born in a dusty gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891, is now one of the world’s two favorite sports, second only to soccer. The games are close cousins.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The establishment and the mob

In The Revolt of the Masses — first published in 1930 — José Ortega y Gasset proposed that the most important fact in the public life of Europe was “the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations and civilization.” What Ortega did not live to witness is the ease with which the mass becomes a mob, or an aggregation of many and various mobs, by mental or emotional contagion similar to that of disease. This fact was left for the generations alive today to experience in the fulness of its reality.

Bill Kauffman

Roque is alive and well in Angelica, New York

Goose-pulling is dead and gone, and lawn darts are on life support, but roque is alive and well and avoiding the roster of extinct sports thanks to the good folks of Angelica, an attractive village of fewer than 1,000 souls in the southwestern corner of New York State. What’s that: you’ve never heard of roque? Affix a “c” to its left and a “t” to its right and you have its sporting parent. Roque is a nineteenth-century American variation on the erstwhile European pastime of the leisure class. A hybrid of croquet and billiards, it is played on an oval-octagonal court of sand and clay with fixed wickets and hardwood boundaries off which a player can ricochet shots. Its mallets, shorter than those used in croquet, are now either homemade or handed down from roquers past.

Cosmo Landesman

The cult of cleverness

Whenever I’m at a dinner party with very clever people, I always feel like I’m the dumbest person in the room — and that’s because I am the dumbest person in the room. I should point out that I’m not really dumb dumb — well, most of the time. But by every test of intelligence I am: I have a low IQ, I failed to get into a university, I don’t understand Google maps and I don’t get how the twenty-four-hour clock works. I speak no other languages. In terms of cognitive capital, I’m broke. Everyone in my circle wants to be the smartest person in the room. Smart is sexy. Clever women like clever men. They never have sex with dumb guys like me. Is it a breeding thing or a reading thing?

Life