Not-So-Gentle Readers,
I would like to submit for your consideration some excerpts from a small compendium I put together a while back, entitled “The Official Rule Book: Road Map to a Better Society.”
I can only hope that you may find these observations of mine to be, well modestly diverting – in a mildly amusing sort of fashion . . . .
A true giant of 20C American letters, H. L. Mencken, confessed at one point that if he had his way, “no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.” Now, genius endures and truth is eternal, so one is hesitant in presuming to find fault, but with all due respect to HLM, times have changed, and his worthy suggestion might need an update.
It must be noted that he wrote this remark in 1943, one or two years before Martina Navratilova was born, back before there were female sportscasters like Jeanne Zelasko.
Undoubtedly, Mencken enjoyed condescending to our Latino neighbors to the south, but … their mythic status as free-spirited gauchos of the rolling pampas notwithstanding … it would be a mistake to underestimate the businessmen of Argentina, an impressively cosmopolitan society. One must doubt whether they would have have been willing to take Navrotilova off our hands - at any price.
And certainly, Mencken himself would be the first to agree that his second category must be expanded to include Zelasko and her ilk.