Politics & Power Quote by Michael Lewis

Lewis lands the punch with a feint: he starts by denying the premise that a country has a wholesome, unifying pastime, then immediately replaces it with something both banal and damning. The repetition of "national pasttime" (and the casual, almost throwaway "Really") is doing more work than it looks. It mimics conversational shrugging while quietly insisting on a cultural indictment: whatever Americans tell themselves about baseball, road trips, or rugged individualism, the shared ritual is passive consumption.

The subtext is less about television as a device than about what TV stands in for in late-20th-century America: attention outsourced, experience mediated, civic life converted into spectator sport. Lewis, a writer who built a career explaining systems by watching people behave inside them, is pointing to the most democratic habit we have, because it requires no taste, no training, no community. You can do it alone, endlessly, and still feel plugged into "the culture". That convenience is the critique.

Context matters: Lewis came of age in the era when TV wasnor just entertainment but the central pipeline for news, war imagery, political theater, and consumer desire. By calling it the national pastime, he collapses leisure and citizenship into the same activity: sit still, watch someone else act, and mistake that for participation. The line works because it flatters no one and doesnt need to. It just names the room we're already in.