Bingo – I fashion myself a Salieri too.

I somehow missed that you are a ’synthesizer.’ Very interesting, thanks for sharing that.

The “Mozart” I would most like to emulate – Professor Don Boudreau, http://www.cafehayek.com. Makes simple and clear the most complex of economic analysis, and always with the focus where it should be – human cooperation trumps coercion whenever and wherever applied. The sadness is how many of our fellow freemen have bought the notion that freedom is imperfect and coercion can compensate for that imperfection.

As with politicians, we WANT to like sports ‘heroes.’ We easily confuse the way we identify with ‘our team’ with some perception that there’s an actual relationship through the practice of ‘fandom.’ I was flying in combat with a crew. A pilot crewmate threatened to beat up (jokingly?) a fellow warrior over his negative comments about Ozzie Osbourne; that’s right, he was saying “I’ll verbally intimidate a person who works to keep my miserable body intact in combat to show my loyalty to a man I’ve never met- a man who cares not one whit whether I live or die.”

How does this happen? In what way did it become functional for humans to so easily be seduced by their ‘identification’ with rock stars, sports players, politicians and religious leaders? The process is so ubiquitous that it must have served human survival well over millions of years. Is it nothing more than an extension of tribalism, that psycho-social process whereby I team up with my brother to fight my father, my family to fight our relatives, our relatives to fight any other family, those in my town to fight any other town, etc etc etc? That’s my best guess. IOW, the ability to form these pseudo bonds enabled us to set aside our own needs long enough to ‘team up with the tribe’ and thus, increase the chances of our progeny living long enough to render us biologically irrelevant. The remnant of that today is that millions of us spend life energy wondering what kind of people this or that sports hero are. We actually care “what they are like”. Some people seem to care more about sports/political/music/movie stars than about their kids, parents or spouses – I remember seeing video coverage of some poor woman who cried for three days in her bedroom when that famous race car driver crashed and died. She’d never even met the man. Wow.

In any event, I watch sports differently these days. I may seccumb to the pseudo-relationship of fandom as I cheer the Crimson Tide, but only with the knowledge that I’m choosing a delusion for entertainment and distraction. There’s a moment of delight, of joy, of immense satisfaction when I can watch a player on ‘my’ team execute his role with perfection, with surreal ability, or with simple gritty determination; and one of the prerequisites for the experience is ‘caring’ which team wins the contest. I “wanna see greatness” on the gridiron.

My kids enjoy participating in ‘fandom’ as much as I did as a kid, and we all enjoy participating together. I’m not sure it’s the best choice for us or our lives. It may just be a waste of time and energy. For now, I’ll take the good with the bad and I’ll be cheering for the Tide in September with the same deluded-enjoyment I’ve always had; but with no mis-perception that any of the players are any better, or any worse, people than Tiger is. I hope for their sake they aspire to learn from Tiger’s mistakes.

FWIW, IMHO, Tiger has “paid” with more than just dollars. The hallmark of obsessive compulsive behaviors is the lack of joy in the activity. He was taken by an illusion, he was had by mis-perceiving the illness of others as ‘having it all’, he fell for the big stage equivalent of a parlor trick. He was seduced by the illusion of his own significance. He sold out in order to consort with sell outs. There’s every reason to believe that Tiger knows he betrayed everything he would like to stand for, has undermined every example he would like to be able to offer to his children, and did so to get the equivalent of a 400 yard rive into a water hazard. He paid. He’s paying. He may also gain something invaluable from it all, learn something he may not have been able to learn any other way. I hope he does(I hope we all do, we’ve made and make similar mistakes on our own smaller stages). He paid for the lesson.