Politics & Power Quote by Erma Bombeck

America likes to pretend it’s a nation of wholesome rituals: hot dogs, bleachers, seventh-inning stretches, a clean mythology with box scores. Erma Bombeck punctures that postcard with one sly pivot: “Not me.” Three words that announce both dissent and intimacy, as if she’s leaning across the kitchen table to tell you what everyone already knows but no one dignifies as civic identity. Her punchline - “It’s gossip” - works because it reframes a guilty pleasure as a public institution, something as organized and sustaining as a sport.

Bombeck’s intent isn’t to moralize; it’s to deflate American self-seriousness. Baseball is the approved story we tell about ourselves: fair play, patience, nostalgia, men in neat uniforms. Gossip is the real-time economy underneath, the social currency traded at work, in neighborhoods, in church pews, and, today, across group chats and comment sections. The subtext is affectionate and a little accusatory: we crave connection so badly we’ll get it by proxy, through other people’s lives, scandals, and small humiliations.

Context matters. Bombeck made a career translating domestic life and everyday hypocrisy into clean, sharp comedy in an era when women’s observations were often dismissed as “light.” By calling gossip a national pastime, she elevates that supposedly trivial realm into a diagnostic tool: pay attention to what people whisper about, and you’ll learn what they fear, envy, and admire. The joke lands because it’s true, and because it quietly implicates the reader as both fan and player.