The news coverage for the last few days has been dominated by allegations of sexual harassment by Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. The steady drip, drip, drip of new information and accusations has knocked all other news off the front page.
I don’t mean to downplay the importance of dealing properly with incidents of sexual harassment, nor do I mean to be insensitive to the issue of potential misconduct by a presidential candidate — but I think it is ludicrous that the Cain story has commanded more attention than, say, the ongoing debt problems in Italy that have toppled a government and threaten to send one of the largest economies in the world into a default that would be devastating for the global economy.
In America, we always seem to fixate on tawdry tales of misconduct by political figures. Our recent history is littered with characters like Elizabeth Ray, Fannie Fox, and Donna Rice. Once they were featured in headlines; now they are forgotten.
The Cain story deals with incidents that allegedly happened more than a decade ago. Cain himself is merely one of eight candidates for the Republican nomination who hasn’t received even one vote yet, because no primary will occur for weeks. The Italian problem, in contrast, could cause crippling losses on the part of banks that hold Italian debt and thereby plunge the world into another recession. Which story is more important?
Frazier won a gold medal at the 1964 Olympics and held the world heavyweight title for three years, from 1970 to 1973. He was best known, however, for his three titanic bouts with his nemesis, Muhammad Ali. Frazier won the first, and lost the last two, but all of the fights were legendary clashes. It is almost impossible to overstate the excitement and anticipation for each of those fights — especially now, when boxing has retreated far into the back pages of the sports sections of daily newspapers — but the entire sports world focused on Frazier and Ali as they trained, traded verbal jabs, and then stepped into the ring to fight for real. I always rooted for Ali, but I respected Frazier because you knew that Smokin’ Joe was going to give every fight his very best.
