Politics & Power Quote by Bob Greene

Greene’s move is to demote baseball with a shrug, then land the real punch: the shared American ritual isn’t a game, it’s a medium. The line “like it or not” is the tell. He’s anticipating the reader’s nostalgia and preemptively labeling it denial. Baseball, in the old mythology, stands for civic togetherness, intergenerational memory, the slow rhythm of summer. Greene doesn’t bother litigating whether baseball is still popular; he sidesteps the sports debate and indicts the infrastructure of attention itself.

The subtext is about fragmentation disguised as unity. A “national pastime” implies a single activity that binds strangers into the same story at the same time. Greene argues that only television still reliably performs that function, not because it’s noble, but because it’s ubiquitous and engineered for habit. The implication is slightly bleak: the thing Americans most consistently do together is sit still and be marketed to. Even sports, in this framing, survive less as participatory culture than as televised content.

Context matters: Greene is writing from the late-20th-century media transition, when cable multiplies channels, professional leagues become entertainment brands, and family life reorganizes around screens. Calling TV the pastime isn’t just a gripe about couch potatoes; it’s a diagnosis of how public life gets mediated. Baseball loses its crown not to football or basketball, but to the device that turns every event - including baseball - into programming. That’s why the line works: it flips a sentimental question (“What game are we?”) into an uncomfortable one (“What are we paying attention to, and who benefits?”).