Some Hype for Unity’s Sake

Overheard:

I’ll eat one of those Lakers flags--yellow or purple--if one more fevered sports yahoo gushes that they show how we’re “coming together as a city.” Bring the city together? Baloney. The NBA playoffs only draw us close to our own television sets. If we really wanted to come together as a city, more than 28% of us would have bothered to vote last week.

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No team sets a goody-goody goal of uniting a city. That comes coincidentally because the team is good. People like winners. Ask the Romans. If you get good, they will come. Next election, have Laker players visit polling places all day. Then check turnout.

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Pshaw! You want “uniting the city”? It’s not the freeway cavalry of clunkers and SUVs with flags a-flying. It’s the 100 or so families who showed up last month to plant trees and paint murals at a Mar Vista elementary school, or the 60,000 people who participated in this year’s Revlon Run-Walk for cancer around Exposition Park.

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The Lakers are not the means to bring the city together. The team is a means, no worse than others and an infinitely better marketer than many admirable civic activities that’ll have more lasting impact but seem to cherish their oblivion.

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These are overpaid, overgrown boys playing a schoolyard game. Even the inherent drama of the playoffs is lost amid the tired sports cliches and the sophomoric beer ads. And we are the suckers for succumbing to the hype.

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Hype? In Los Angeles? I’m shocked! Of course we’re suckers. That’s the eternal entertainment bargain--from Shakespeare to the bearded lady to the roller coaster to the symphony--they get our money in return for making us forget everything else for a while. What’s wrong with that?

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Just think if all that energy and enthusiasm were channeled into the new neighborhood councils! Think if the money spent on Lakers flags were given to the schools.

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Here’s the point: If it takes five sweaty men bouncing a large tan ball to make 3,694,820 Angelenos--not to mention all the people in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties--realize they share a common community and maybe some aspirations, isn’t that better than fighting? If you don’t like it, change the channel and watch five sweaty women bouncing a large tan ball. Or studious men in plaid pants hitting a small white ball. Or ....