Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, On America’s ‘Opiate of the Masses’)

“In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist and memoirist Russell Baker (1925-2019), “The Muscular Opiate,” The New York Times,  Oct. 3, 1967

Russell Baker is playing, of course, off Karl Marx's infamous line that religion is the opiate of the masses. But in our age, the Super Bowl has taken on the trappings of a secular religion, even being played on a Sunday, inspiring an unusual amount of reverence for a game that, after all, involves 300-plus-pound mastodons in shoulder pads colliding at ferocious speeds. 

Baker wrote those lines in the autumn of 1967, when the Green Bay Packers were two months away from their second and last Super Bowl under coach Vince Lombardi. The game was already assuming inflated dimensions (why do you think it was called “Super”?), but nothing like the orgy of wretched excess it has become in recent years. 

Growing up, I was never the type of young man uninterested in athletic pursuits that Baker labeled “asportual.” Having checked in on the big game on Sunday, albeit intermittently, I can’t even be said to be one now.

But I am certainly nothing like the teen who could have reeled off the starters of his favorite gridiron teams of the Seventies, the Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers. I am all too conscious that a sport that George F. Will defined American as “violence punctuated by committee meetings” has produced a startlingly high number of concussion-related victims. 

Those Roman numerals associated with the Super Bowl—a designation, to my knowledge, not associated with any other sports trophy—may point to more than laughable, over-the-top pretense. 

As corruption and greed took over the Roman Empire, rulers placated their restless subjects with what the ancient satirist Juvenal termed “bread and circuses”—i.e., free food and entertainment. I fear that the American experiment with liberty may have encountered a similar obstacle.

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on Summer)

“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Russell Baker (1925-2019), “Observer: The Strangest Shores,” The New York Times, June 27, 1965

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on the ‘Trump Captivity’)

“To the extent that it had any political content at all, the Trump Captivity might be described as a flare-up of reactionary demagoguery. There was obvious racism in the effort to deny Obama’s citizenship and a hint of more in the slogan about making America ‘great again.’ This could not have been easy to swallow for a party one of whose founders was Abraham Lincoln, yet it submits quietly to the more blatant racism still flourishing in Congress with the do-nothing politics of Senate leaders like Mitch McConnell and the reactionary House faction that rules by terrifying two inert parties.”—Russell Baker, “On the Election—I,” The New York Review of Books, Nov. 10, 2016

At the time he wrote this, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Russell Baker was describing how Donald Trump had captured the Republican Party. A year later, following a cataclysmic election that sounds more and more like a mistake with each passing day, it is America as  a whole that the dictator wannabe has captured.

“America Held Hostage.” During the Iranian hostage crisis nearly 40 years ago under Jimmy Carter, TV viewers grew used to watching those words appear on their screens in the late hours of each evening, in the ABC news show that became Nightline.

Now, America is held hostage again, this time by a touchy megalomaniac unable to stand the slightest criticism even from within the party he captured with shocking swiftness, with far greater damage:

*to civility toward opponents;

*to a rational two-party system; 

*to economic and racial equality; 

*to Presidential rhetoric that contributes to the nation's ideals; 

*to the notion that religion can bring authentic moral witness to the public square; 

*to the global environment left to future generations;

* to national security; 

* to the Constitution;

* and to citizens abroad who can no longer look to the promise of the nation that Abraham Lincoln once termed “the last best hope of earth.”

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, With a ‘Taxpayer’s Prayer’)

“Oh Mighty Internal Revenue Service, who turneth the labor of man to ashes, we thank thee for the multitude of thy forms which thou hast set before us and for the infinite confusion of thy commandments, which multiplyth the fortunes of lawyer and accountant alike.”— Russell Baker, “A Taxpayer’s Prayer to the Almighty IRS,” originally in The New York Times, reprinted in The Morning News (Wilmington, Del.), Apr. 10, 1977

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on How He Became a Writer)

“The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.”— Russell Baker, Growing Up (1982)

The wry tone in this quote helped Russell Baker—born on this date 90 years ago in Morrisonville, Va. —win the Pulitzer Prize twice—not only in the biography category for the first volume of his memoirs, Growing Up, but also in 1979 in the commentary category, for his columns in The New York Times.

Baker’s stint with the Times occupied the bulk of his career (he joined its Washington bureau in 1954 and wrote his column from 1962 to 1998). Even in retirement, he has managed to stay busy, succeeding Alistair Cooke as host of Masterpiece Theatre from 1992 to 2004 and contributing the occasional piece to The New York Review of Books more recently.