This is a post script to the post below on conservatism and the curriculum, only this is specifically about what I said there concerning sports and politcs:
So. Okay. I have to make An Important Confession.
I don’t know anything about sports. It seems kinda strange to admit, but since my childhood sport was … fencing … I somehow barely played basketball, baseball, and never played football. I don’t actually know how football is scored.
So when I say in the post, “I understand it if it’s sports …” what I mean is, understand in a completely abstract sense.
Experiencing a general existential unease at, I don’t know, dying without ever having known anything about sports, professional or collegiate, I’ve been thinking in my dotage that maybe I should take up sports the way I once took up wine as a non-drinker who did all the winebuying for my wife (she figured out I’d buy better quality wine for her than she would). That is, take up wine as a quasi-Wittgensteinean exercise in seeing if I could accurately use the language of wine (shades of mushroom, hints of blueberry, and, heck, squiggles of LSD and rivets of meth) in a more than plausible way without ever having experienced the actual sensation.
It turns out this is not very hard with wine.
It might be some kind of alternative Turing test.
(Update: When I say alternative Turing test, I mean a test to determine whether I might not be a machine, perhaps engaged by the Senior Conspirator. but in fact not a human at all, but instead one of those academic phrase-paper generators. A highly advanced phrase generator, naturally. Have you seen through the deception yet??!)