John Rocker, once the fireballing closer for the Atlanta Braves, hated coming to Queens, NY, to play the Mets before their raucous urban fans. To reporters he said nasty things about NYC gays, about what might happen to him if he took Mets' fans' beloved number 7 train--and he had earlier called an African American player "a fat monkey." You can well imagine what the New York tabloids did with this - and that, in turn, made Mets' fans at Shea louder still - and all this in a September pennant race. What interested me at the time was that baseball officialdom assumed that the problem was psychological and that what Rocker needed was therapy. The triumph of the therapeutic - there are no real political problems; there are only psychological adjustments that need to be made in individuals - comes to baseball. Rocker was a die-hard southern conservative, replete with fears of northern cities and the racism and homophobia that either go along with that or are its source.
From the New York Times: "Last week, Selig, the baseball commissioner, ordered Rocker to undergo a psychological evaluation in the wake of disparaging comments he made about minorities and gays in an article in Sports Illustrated. He ripped teenagers with purple hair, called an African-American teammate a fat monkey and made racial and homophobic slurs about New Yorkers. The tests were ordered Thursday. Rocker visited psychologists on Friday and then left for a hunting trip in Arkansas. But in ordering psychological tests, Selig may have stumbled upon the beginning of a path to slay the wrenching beast of prejudice, intolerance, bigotry. Selig equated racism and bigotry to a psychological disorder to be confronted and wrestled with -- not to be shunted in a closet and hidden."
My favorite line here: Rocker goes to therapy and then off to his hunting trip in Arkansas, where, presumably, his hunting colleagues will reinforce the values of acceptance of diffrence and a love of urban culture.
Here is a link to two Times articles from 2000.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
