Gene Lyons

[mooseandsquirrel]

LITTLE ROCK — Almost everybody’s got his nose out of joint these days, and no wonder.
If there’s a significant American institution that hasn’t failed in its fundamental public responsibility over the past decade, it’d be hard to identify.

Writing in Time, Christopher Hayes puts it succinctly: “early every pillar institution in American society-whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media-has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order.”

Me, I blame the combination of runaway baseball salaries, the “talented and gifted” movement in schools and the tyranny of SAT scores.

I’m only half joking. Once free agency drove even an average third baseman’s pay into the seven-figure range formerly reserved for tycoons who owned major industries or medium-sized Midwestern states, practically everybody with SAT scores over 1400 figured he deserved to earn as much as Aramis Ramirez.

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